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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Wednesday, May 09, 2012 3:47 PM
Flint's Dayne Walling - a Mayor open to ideas and opportunities for his city
The story of Flint Michiganneed not be retold here. The story of Flint is the story of many Rustbelt cities from Troy New York to St. Louis Missouri. Existing for decades as a city with good jobs for all that wanted one, a city that rewarded enterprise and hard work. The downturn of the US automobile industry was recently (But chimerically) reversed by pumping billions of taxpayer dollars to Chrysler and General Motors, yet has had little effect on the city itself. |
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Posted on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 4:40 PM
Canberra Plan 1900s
Canberra Today
In the early part of the 20th century, a rising and
confident Australia decided to create a national capital. It was to be a planned city, and surprisingly
enough an American named Walter Burley Griffinwon the competition to design Canberra.
The Griffin design was linked theoretically and
contextually to the first stirrings of modern planning and to the visionary
land economics of the classical economists.
In the case of Griffin, it was his commitment and enthusiasm to good
economic sense and economic justice learned through his lifelong reading of the
American economist Henry George. |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Friday, April 20, 2012 11:49 AM
Independence? Perhaps, but not likely
Recently, an
active and conservative member of the Republican Party in central Pennsylvania
sent UrbanTools a copy of something called the "Property
Tax Independence Act" (PTIA)
with the interesting subtitle of "Liberty Equality and
Prosperity". The legislation – more
accurately a proposal for a constitutional amendment in the state of
Pennsylvania – Is given a seemingly official sobriquet of “House
Bill 1776.”
As yet, this is not an
actual bill however. |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Wednesday, March 07, 2012 4:16 PM
From the Collar City: You are Invited to a discussion on a new way to tax
Can your town use a new approach to in finance, planning and its relationships with citizens?
Property taxes are both the main source of revenue for local governments, and at the same time the most unpopular. Economically, property taxes as they are currently structured, reward blight and disinvestment, while discouraging real estate markets from operating in more urbanized areas. One tool used by dozens of cities in the US in hundreds of cities elsewhere is the land value tax is the land value tax. |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:30 PM
Abandoning outdated land values will harmonize Taiwan's many species of land and property taxes...
(photo: CW)
The tax policies of Taiwan has always made it a successful outlier, one of the few Asian Tigers to prosper right after World War II, and doing well until the recent global slump. A lynchpin of that policy is value-based land taxation. Even though the agricultural land tax is moribund (since 1985), it has been argued that the goal of that tax, to free up large estates (in the manner Denmark's |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Monday, February 06, 2012 2:26 PM
Welsh Land Value Tax
Wales AP Member Mark Drakeford
Without fear of contradiction, it is easy to assert that the concept of tax reformnowfrom global to local has taken off in the past three years. The global economic downturn still lasts, and postindustrial areas in North America, Europe are in particular need of a way to level the playing field with more efficient and competitive Asian, African and Latin American markets. Although governments may dither, leaders have emerged all over the world ready to challenge dominant, smug yet failed policies. |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Friday, February 03, 2012 1:39 PM
The clocks ticks on bad tax policy as the big dogs jump in.
Not too long ago, a Blair wallah sniffed at a land value tax as akin to the window tax of 18th Century yore. In the face of a very possible recurring recession, the easy condescension is increasingly out of place...
Background: UrbanTools always looks internationally to developments in other think tanks and nations for a sense that old methods taxation and finance cease to be based in terms of left or right, but rather on what works and what doesn't.
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Thursday, February 02, 2012 6:13 PM
Failure is not an option: Connecticut Building Permits Slide
There is no state as well situated for growth and prosperity than Connecticut. Just beyond reach of New York's staggeringly high taxes and overlooking the placid Long Island Sound, crossed by rail and Interstate connections, and with one large airport, Connecticut has parlayed these advantages into a couple of centuries of growth, jobs and wealth.
Yet, slippage in the US economy as a whole coupled with a growing rich/poor divide ( |
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Posted on Monday, January 30, 2012 4:50 PM
Steve Hanke and Stephen Walters have been writing on taxation and economic policy for years, with close analyses of what makes urban areas hit or miss. Their latest piecein the Wall Street Journal emphasizes why some cities are more stable than others: reasonable taxes. Some might disagree that low property taxes are the driver of growth, although that helps. Taxation on mobile forms of wealth, like incomes, commerce and sales hurt more.
Happily, respected Case Western economics professor |
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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Friday, January 13, 2012 5:35 PM
UrbanTools got underway as the Henry George Foundation of America in Pittsburgh in 1926. Through the years, some of the most respected elected officials in Western Pennsylvania such as Pennsylvania Gov. David Lawrence, and mayors Scully and McNair served on our Board of Directors.
During those 85+ years, Pittsburgh and other Allegheny County cities and school districts have utilized land value taxation as a tool to discourage private land banking and to encourage all levels of investment and labor inside municipal boundaries. |
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