The world according to GRP — Thursday, March 16, 2006:
Infrastructure without land tax
This is to confirm my authorship of Infrastructure on a Bootstrap Budget, which was sent to all Australian State and Territory legislators on March 14, 2006.
Like my previous writings on infrastructure, this paper suggests that a fraction of the uplifts in land values due to public infrastructure projects be recycled through the tax system in order to pay for the projects, leaving the rest of the uplifts as unearned windfalls for the affected property owners. But, whereas my previous published writings have proposed to recycle the uplifts by means of some variant of land tax or municipal rates, this paper proposes a variant of conveyancing stamp duties — which seems to be more politically acceptable.
But whichever tax is used, the end result is that property owners retain a large fraction of the benefit of projects that would otherwise not proceed. A fraction of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.
P.S. (March 17): The first draft of Infrastructure on a Bootstrap Budget was finished on February 4, before I read Philip Day's book Hijacked Inheritance (see my review). So the book didn't actually inspire my latest proposal, but did help to convince me of its political advantages.
Copyright © Gavin R. Putland except as otherwise attributed. Posted at The world according to GRP under the title Infrastructure without land tax. You may republish this item verbatim on your website or blog provided that you include this notice (with hyperlinks).
Comment |
Email this post: 
