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Posted on Monday, May 14, 2012 12:43 PM
 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 |
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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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Joshua Vincent: Posted on Monday, May 07, 2012 3:39 PM
Philadelphia Pennsylvania like most cities, counties and states have had to deal with tight budgets for nearly half a decade. For many reasons, not least of which are legacy expenses, revenue requirements will be increasing even as economies at the local and regional level still react sluggishly as the great recession of 2008 begins its ebb tide. A complicating factor in Philadelphia's fiscal struggle is the reality that it's tax system is nearly unique in United States as the |
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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Abandoning outdated land values will harmonize Taiwan's many species of land and property taxes...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 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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Posted on Friday, January 06, 2012 3:17 PM
Quick quiz: what's the best use of this Irish land? Irish property bust provides literal fodder.
The New Year brought the first iteration of the property tax in Ireland. In one way, it is a welcome advance in a nation where a land value bubble still reverberates like so many Block Buster bombs.
Hectares of half-built or abandoned"luxury" condos and homes littler the greater Dublin area, after the spectacle of wild-eyed lending that led to property loans making up easily mare than 2/3rds of all bank lending. |
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Josh Vincent: Posted on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 3:06 PM
1506 Dagmar, Pittsburgh. Owner? RDF, LLC 44 Wall Street, NY NY
An articlein last month's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the woes of just one area in Pittsburgh affected by an absentee landlord led UrbanTools to write a letter to the editor after some basic research. Turns out this house is one of hundreds or even thousands owned by an LLC named "Res Distressed Fund." Incorporated under as many as 9 names in Delaware, Res has a litany of unpaid fines, taxes and generally help drag down ever more distressed neighborhoods. |
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