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A Surprise From Rhode Island: Daring to Change Taxes to Help Everybody
Go Ask ALICE: A Progressive Resource for model legislation deploys LVT models.
Support in Connecticut for Land Value Taxation
Taking it to the People: Land Value Tax vote set for May 7th in Lanesborough, Massachusetts
LVT moving through CT?

Most Popular Posts

Noted UK Think Tank: Tax Land Values
Eliminating the property tax? It must not happen, but we’ll see what happens.
Altoona, PA: City tax wholly on land values = normality
Dr. Herbert Barry's Proposal to Really Reassess Allegheny County
How to mend the Property Tax

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Incentive Taxation

National Tax Policy

Go Ask ALICE: A Progressive Resource for model legislation deploys LVT models.







ALICE: Legislation for the rest of us

Some years ago, noted journalist and public servant, Walter Rybeckworked with Bill Filante, a California GOP State Senator to prepare and disseminate model legislation to enact land value taxation.  The venue at that time was ALEC, which at the time prepared legislation with a conservative and free market bent, much in line with GOP philosophy at the time (ALEChas changed quite a bit since the 1980s, and the entry has disappeared.)

Now, there’s an active group providing Progressive model legislation.

The Economist returns to Its roots (most often found in land)















Glasgow: time to stop the private warehousing of land

In 1843, a newspaper named"The Economist"came into being with amission that promisedto discuss and promote ideas of fair trade, liberal economics, free markets and issues of taxation and rent. 

Astoundingly, the Economist stuck to its mission, more or less, although one may - and one does - quibble with its flirtations withflailing neo-classical economics, coupled with some infatuation with permanent Keynesianism.

Rising home prices: who on earth thinks that's good news?


Pop it now!

Moseying through the tinny yet strident “news” from the real estate markets that housing is on the rebound.  To the real estate industry and theirflacks in the press, we're meant to believe any increasing equity will redound to the benefit of homeowners.  Not quite.  

Remember where it all started: the unholy triangle between activist government (everybody gets a house with NO money down) crooked to lazy lenders, and banks who wanted a piece of the action (even though they had no clue

Land Value Tax: UK Rules OK

The drum beat gets louder for serious and sustained debate on all sides of the political spectrum - and all areas - of the UK for land value tax.  From those of us in the US, the pace is dizzying, and is in stark and disgraceful contrast to the fear of all political sides to grasp the nettle, and fix the long retraction that affects all parts of the nation.

This week, the Guardian, a reliably left-of-center newspaper of record has yet another articleengaging LVT,  (Coincidentally, the Economics correspondent of the Guardian

Land Value Tax: it's not Just for Cities Anymore



















Two UrbanTools directors, have struck again in the editorial pages of the Financial Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.   In the June 28 edition of the financial Times,Nicholas Rosenchallenges Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to posit a solution to the problem of growing wealth inequality and economic dysfunction in the United States.  Dr. Stiglitzaccurately names rent seeking as a prime culprit.  Curbing the abuses of rent seeking is not just a matter of changing the law however; it is a matter of changing our tax system in the manner of the

Who owns the Air (waves)?
















Radio Activity: It's in the Air for You and Me*

Land Value Taxation is not just about tax revenue collected from property values in cities.  It's also about identifyingrent-seekingandmonopoly privilegethat increase burdens on communities, commerce and citizens.  LVT addresses these universal issues: wherever one looks for it, one can find it.

A superb example is the periodic tussles over the air, specifically, the bandwidths of thebroadcast spectruminherent in nature.

Should I Stay or Should I go?

 What do we mean when we say we must tax that which is immobile?

In our reality of disappearing borders, a global interplay of commerce, capital and labor, a sensible urban society wants to tax that which is immobile.  If we want to maintain cities as the engines of our culture, they need to have a reliable source of revenue.  Land and land values are the textbook definition of immobile.  It is understandable that some may insist that the traditional property tax - falling on land and buildings – is also immobile; yet a closer examination informs us that buildings can suddenly become very mobile indeed.

How to mend the Property Tax

Assaults on the property tax have been commonplace in the US (and Australia,New Zealand, etc.) in the past few decades.  We think that the property has a lot wrong with it; but its a situation that calls for a scalpel not an atom bomb.  Here are some basic alternative solutions, including the land value tax as a way to abolish the tax on buildings.


Four Ameliorations for Assessment Increases or Tax Increases: an Analysis
William Batt, Ph.D., Joshua Vincent, ED

Taiwan to reform property values, will help revenue and tax transparency.

Abandoning outdated land values will harmonize Taiwan's many species of land and property taxes...
Christine Liu, Taiwan's Finance Minister









(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

Cymraeg treth tir gwerth (Welsh land value tax)

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.