alt Hacker NewsWell, I (and most economists) disagree.
I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electricity. An income tax makes it more expensive to give people jobs, so even if the earner pays it, that burden is also bore by the unemployed. Whoever pays the tax, they just pass it on to the rest of the economy.
But that's ok, because taxes can be paired with other methods like cash transfers or social programs that can effectively redistribute wealth. We should try to raise taxes with methods that have good side effects (LVT, carbon taxes), and then redistribute as necessary.
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> The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax.
As a homeowner, who else bears my tax?
“Most economists” haven’t the faintest clue how money works. Relying on their pronouncements is why we’re in the mess we’re in.
The LVT doesn’t work for the fairly simple reason that value is in the eye of the beholder and requires a bureaucracy, tax is paid from income and rich people have power and therefore just put the prices up to recover the extra cost, which they can do because there are fewer jobs than people that want them.
Legal tax incidence != economic tax incidence
Taxation by estate agent is a non-starter in any democracy. Nobody likes real estate people to start with.
Reducing the insane wealth concentration at the top has positive side effects if it prevents whatever's been happening in politics the last decade.