What are the pros of a flat tax over a proggessive tax?

Yes, well, I'm sure slave ownership served a self-insurance role in the antebellum south, too. But with homeownership it's more self-defense than self-insurance: landowning is the only way to get off the treadmill of the landless and onto the landowners' escalator that it powers.

 

Wrong! The pressures of home ownership lead to well-being problems in themselves. The costs from the self-insurance can be sizeable.

 

No, I am correct.

As is normal with any rent seeking behavior -- as you would know if you knew any economics.

 

Calling self-insurance 'rent seeking behaviour' is very silly! That's the trouble with your old-hatted Georgism. As soon as you are asked to talk specifics you put your foot in it

 

I dunno, maybe they ought to GET liquid. Our savings rate is way too low. I would exempt primary residences anyway.

Probably much lower than that. Maybe down to 3 or 4%.

 

If it ain't trickling down, it must be trickling up. Which, of course, it has been for 40-some years now.

What's in it for me if it is trickling down elsewhere?

 

That's just another stupid and dishonest strawman lie from you, Reiver. You always have to tell stupid and dishonest lies about what I have plainly written. ALWAYS.

As you know, but deliberately chose to lie about, I didn't say self-insurance was rent seeking behavior. That WOULD be silly. I said that using LANDOWNERSHIP to self-insure was rent seeking behavior. That statement, of course, is not silly at all but objectively correct, because in that case, the mechanism of self-insurance is a privilege of collecting rent.

<yawn> You again choose, consciously and deliberately, to lie about what I have plainly written, as I knew you inevitably would. You have become quite incontinent about it. I have not mentioned Georgism, and have told you many times that I neither call nor consider myself a Georgist. So you are just name-calling. As usual.

Another stupid lie from you.

 

We know that homeownership is used as a self-insurance device. You're therefore making that very much idiotic claim! As I said, once you are forced to talk specifics you make all sorts of outrageous clams.

I merely know political economy and your one dimensional script. Perhaps you should widen your horizons? Actually make valid comment for the change!

 

Nope. You again choose deliberately to lie. Your "argument" is a fallacy of composition, equivalent to claiming that because sugar is food, and eating sugar makes you fat, eating food makes you fat. It's just fallacious, absurd and (surprse!) dishonest.

LOL! You are the one who can't do better than obvious lies and fallacies.

<yawn>

 

Nope, its basic logic. We know that home ownership is about self-insurance. You've accused those home owners of being thieves and 'rent seekers'. Again, you only show your contempt for your common man as your ideological rant runs amok. The rest of your script is your standard response to being caught out. A regular outcome (even with the less educated right wingers!)

 

Only in the sense that it's a known basic logical fallacy.

No, you're lying; we only know that it can sometimes be used that way in self-defense by people trying to escape the workers' treadmill, which powers the landowners' escalator.

Which all landowners are, by definition.

I would not call you my common man.

Bloviation to evade the fact that your claims have again been proved fallacious, absurd and dishonest.

 

I don't think someone that calls homeowners 'worse than thieves' is going to be too knowledgable in the logic stakes.

We know that we cannot explain international differences in owner occupation without reference to the self-insurance motivation. That home ownership is higher in poorer countries (and home ownership, through its relationship with equilibrium unemployment and reservation wages, is also associated with greater underpayment) makes a mockery of your usual 'parasites' emotionalism

The Georgist script unravels!

 

What you think is irrelevant. The FACT is, you committed an elementary logical fallacy, as you frequently do.

And would you agree that slave owners are worse than thieves? The only difference between owning a slave and owning land is that when you own a slave, you remove all of one person's rights, while when you own land, you remove one of all persons' rights.

More accurately, we know you claim that, but cannot support your claim.

Non sequitur. As usual. The significant relationship between home ownership rates and national standard of living (per capita GDP) is entirely explained by the impacts of urbanization and government assistance programs for renters, which are uncommon in poor countries but common in rich ones. See Malpezzi 1989 and Angel 2000.

You are the one following a script, Reiver. All too obviously.

 

I was being charitable. Someone calling homeowners 'worse than thieves' is definitely going to struggle in the logic stakes.

A silly comment. Its been shown in numerous studies, including the Castles study mentioned. You can do it yourself, armed just with excel. Just two columns required: home ownership rates and relative poverty rates.

Nonsense! We're referring to the likes of Western Europe and North America. We're also talking about comparatively small differences in poverty rates (and similar policies; e.g. Britain, which has relatively high home ownership and high poverty, also has considerably support for renting)

You've already used that terrible line. Can't we get one of the other Georgist cronies on here to freshen up your one liners?

 

No. You were trying to divert attention from the fact that I proved your claim a fallacy.

I proved you know no logic.

As landowners are effectively thieving from the landless, it would not be surprising that countries with more homeowners have a poorer landless underclass.

So you are reliant on a restriction of range error. No surprises there.

And an extreme concentration of landownership, which is certainly going to aggravate the poverty of the landless.

ROTFL!! This, from YOU!?!?!??

 

Divert? I'm happy to see you make non-logical statements such as 'homeowners are worse than thieves'

Utter drivel again. Approx. 50% of Britain's poor, for example, are home owners. And, as shown by the subsequent analysis generated by the Oswald hypothesis, home owners are actually more likely to suffer from underpayment (i.e. see even greater loss in the form of economic rent)

Only an id-jut would try and make comparison between the developed and developing countries. The housing markets exhibit no similarity (making, for example, analysis into price and income elasticity impossible)

Zero attempt to reply to the quote. Again you show how easily flummoxed you are when forced to deviate from the script

Is that a 'no'? Not one of the Georgist cronies capable of taking a creative writing evening course?

 

I've long believed the only "fair" tax is a flat tax and eliminate all deductions. I honestly didn't think I'd see a discussion of it in my lifetime. I still don't think I'll see it implemented in my lifetime but it's good to see people discussing it. Tax individual and corporate income, interest, capital gains, etc. at the same flat tax rate (somewhere around 10%-12%). I think to tax anyone at 25% or 30% or more is obscene. Everyone contributes, the rich and big corporations automatically pay more. One of the obvious benefits is less bureaucracy, smaller IRS, reduced government spending, less fraud. It would be so much easier to do your tax returns. I would end up paying about the same amount as I do now although my tax rate is technically much higher. I think most of the middle class would be in the same boat.

 

Why should earned income be taxed at all? Maybe your just being a conformist?

Seems sort of arbitrary to me

What if most of their income was GIVEN to them via government spending? Like suppose government builds a new bridge that greatly increases access to some land that I own, and as a result of that new bridge, my income jumps from 50k per year to 500K per year. Under this circumstance, even if government taxed me at 90% of my new income, I would be no worse off than before they built the bridge. Why should others pay taxes to build something that only enriched me?

Why should people who do not benefit from government activity contribute? Government activities make some people richer, why not just tax those people in proportion to how much government activity is making them richer?

If those are things that are important to you, then a land value tax would be a far better choice, because it does all those things better and more efficiently.

 

Peddling myth again! Blaug (2000, Henry George: rebel with a cause, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Vol. 7, pp 270-288 ) sums it up:

Georgism was effectively killed off by the dramatic fall in rental shares in both the USA and the UK from something like 15 per cent in the 1870s to 6 per cent in the 1960s (Andelson 1979: 88 ). Even when we include the imputed rent of owner-occupiers and allow for the stimulating effect of the withdrawal of non-land taxes, we still get no higher than 20 per cent of national income in modern times (Tideman 1994: 18, Hudson et al. 1995: 150&#8211;51). In short, whatever the other merits of LVT, the &#8216;all&#8217;-devouring rent thesis&#8217; is now as dead as a doornail&#8230;[T]he growth of land rentals in a capitalist economy never was a convincing explanation of the persistence of poverty despite growing affluence and it became an ever less convincing explanation as manufacturing expanded and agriculture shrank. Land speculation never was the root cause of business fluctuations and LVT would dampen but never eliminate periodic booms and slumps; the revenue that LVT, fully and properly applied, was capable of raising may at one time have been sufficient for the expenses of government but ever since 1930 the very notion of LVT as a single tax has seemed almost laughable

 

I have proved it is logical.

No, of course they're not. You are just lying again. You know that poor people don't own real estate. Calling a billionaire who has no income "poor" is just a lie. You are reliant on telling that exact lie.

No, they just have less incentive to pursue their full wages because they already get so much for doing nothing. Why bother? Of course, in what you are no doubt pleased to call your "mind," that means the lazy billionaire landowner is not only "poor" but "suffering underpayment." Such absurdities are too dishonest to be merely the droolings of an id-jut.

BWAHAHAHAHHAAAA!!!

Only a lying sack of $#!+ would try and pretend that artificial range restriction doesn't invalidate a statistical claim.

No, that's just another stupid lie from you. The housing markets are as similar between developed and developing countries as between different developed countries. We already know, for example, that developed countries with a German legal tradition have markedly lower rates of homeownership than developed countries with an English legal tradition, independently of their wealth and poverty levels.

You just told another stupid lie. No surprises there.

Again you can offer nothing but stupid, dishonest garbage.

It's a braying laugh in your silly, lying, dishonest face.

<yawn> How horrid it must be to be you, or to know you.

 

The number around 60% in the US. Even some very simple "napkin math" tells me that many of those aren't "billionaires"... Necessarily many of them would be very much middle class.

To be fair the way this is measured by the census bureau is the number of homes occupied by the owner, not a percentage of adults who own homes. I do believe this is a better measure because the number of adults that own homes would be skewed by married couples, adult children or elderly parents living with relatives. In either case, that's a huge number of 'parasitic rent seekers'.

 

I like the flat tax because everyone pays the same. the more you make the more you pay. That is fair to me.

 

No, stating a fact of economics that you consistently lie about.

You have posted that deeply misinformed quote so many times because it is the only support you can find for your false and dishonest claims.

The event Blaug describes of course did not actually happen. Rent was just hidden in corporate profits, resident owners' capital gains, etc.

Wrong again. It is of course higher in densely populated countries where marginal land -- the worst land in use -- is extremely disadvantageous. Gaffney (2008 ) shows that potential rent revenue is much, much higher even in countries like the USA:

economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers08/08-12old.pdf

Claiming and proving are two different things. Blaug is here making the astounding claim that as LVT could only raise 20% of GDP for public purposes and benefit without harm to the economy, it would not be worth the trouble of replacing unjust, inefficient, costly and economically destructive taxes with it! No, not at all! Better to slag LVT relentlessly, make up dishonest statistics that understate rent by an order of magnitude, or even claim it is negative, as the US Federal Reserve actually did in 1993!

Flat false. Blaug's implication here that land rents are associated with agriculture but not manufacturing merely shows that he not only does not understand the relevant economic arguments, but does not even know what land rent is.

???

BWAHAHHAHHAAAHHHHAA!!!

The Mississippi Bubble?

The South Sea Bubble?

How unfortunate for Blaug that he was writing in 2000, and hadn't the benefit of knowing about the 2008 global financial crisis caused by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

But it seems that although he knew about the 1990 Japanese land speculation crash that has crippled the world's former second largest economy for most of the last two decades, he decided deliberately to ignore it. One wonders just how much Blaug was prepared to ignore in his monomaniacal ferocity to slag LVT....

Oh, well, a policy that would merely dampen booms and slumps is not worth even considering, is it? Far better to just slag it relentlessly, without any regard for historical fact, economic theory, or prudent public policy, and give trillions to greedy banksters when their proclivity for financing land speculation inevitably blows up in all our faces. Again.

But only to people like Blaug who are being well paid to laugh.

 

But the only ones who could be poor are those who have little or no equity.

So? That's what makes the scam work politically: take $10K from them in taxes, give back $5K in land rent, and they will kneel and lick your boots in gratitude, ignoring the fact that you gave the other $5K to bigger parastic rent seekers (and gave nothing back to those who don't own land).

 

Can you explain what is fair about being made to pay for having earned money by your productive contributions to the wealth of society, rather than paying for society's contributions to YOUR wealth?