Independently of the other parts, I like this notion of poverty. I head-chunk the idea as any external thing a person lacks, of which they are struggling to keep the minimum; that is poverty.
This seems very flexible, because it isn't a fixed bar like an income level. It also seems very actionable, because it is asking questions of the object-level reality instead of hand-wavily abstracting everything into money.
Over at Astral Codex Ten is a book review of Progress and Poverty with three follow-up blog posts by Lars Doucet. The link goes to the first blog post because it has links to the rest right up front.
I think it is relevant because Progress and Poverty is the book about:
...strange and immense and terrible forces behind the Poverty Equilibrium.
The pitch of the book is that the fundamental problem is economic rents deriving from private ownership over natural resources, which in the book means land. As a practical matter the focus on land rents in the book heavily overlaps the modern discussion around housing. The canonical example of the problem is what a landlord charges to rent an apartment.
One interesting point is that while UBI is suggested (here called a Citizen's Dividend), it is for justice reasons, and is not proposed as a solution to poverty. I expect Henry George would agree that a UBI would not eliminate poverty, and would predict it mostly gets gobbled up by the immense and terrible forces behind the Poverty Equilibrium.
I feel like the absence of large effects is to be expected during a short-term experiment. It would be deeply shocking to me if there was a meaningful shift in stuff like employment or housing in any experiment that doesn't run for a significant fraction of the duration of a job or lease/rental agreement. For a really significant study you'd want to target the average in an area, I expect.
This is why San Francisco was chosen as the example - at least over the last decade or so it has been one of the most inelastic housing supplies in the U.S.
You are therefore exactly correct: it does not comply with basic supply and demand. This is because basic supply and demand usually do not apply for housing in American cities due to legal constraints on supply, and subsidies for demand.
I acknowledge the bow-out intention, and I'll just answer what look like the cruxy bits and then leave it.
There's no actual price signal or ground truth for that portion of the value.
Fortunately we have solved this problem! Slightly simplified: what a vacant lot sells for is the land value, and how much more a developed lot next to it sells for is the value of the improvements. Using the prices from properties recently sold is how they usually calculate this.
If it's NOT just using a land-value justification to raise the dollar amounts greatly, please educate me.
Let the record reflect that I totally expect someone to do this. But as for doing it in a non-insane fashion, we take what used to be a property tax and turn it into a sales tax, which is levied on sales of property.
There's a good guest blog post over at AstralCodexTen which digs into the value assessment problem which I think you would like. That whole series of guest blog posts was fascinating.
And with that, we'll call it!
My objection is to the core of the proposal that it's taxed at extremely high levels, based on theoretical calculations rather than actual use value.
I'm a little confused by what the theoretical calculations are in your description. The way I understand it - which is scarcely authoritative but does not confuse me - is that we have several steps:
So my understanding is there are no calculations until you get to the practical considerations of applying the tax.
Your suspected answer is how current implementations of the system work, but they are also regular property taxes in the sense of being a very tiny fraction of the value which means the payments are manageable under normal circumstances, and don't take aim at eliminating the economic rent.
Just scaling up property taxes the way they work now with the new values would be an epically bad move, in the same vein as the taxing unrealized capital gains at a high rate is.
The way I understand it, once we agree the focus is on the economic rent problem, we shift to taxing the sale price and the income from the property because these are how economic rents are captured, rather than an impossibly high annual payment. A homeowner doesn't capture economic rent just by living on the property, as I see it.
So for myself I would not vote for a measure that just scaled up property taxes, but would vote for one that did the sale/revenue taxation.
That isn't how the taxes are assessed, as a practical matter. The value of the land and the value of buildings are assessed, mostly using market data, and then the applied tax is the ratio of the land value to the property value, so for example in an apartment building that fraction is taxed out of the rent payments, and when a property is sold that fraction is taxed from the sale price.
I do notice that we don't have any recent examples of the realistically-full land tax interacting with individual home ownership; everywhere we see it is treated the same as a regular property tax. While it seems reasonable to me that non-income-producing properties should not require regular payments and instead only be taxed at point of sale, this is an adaptation rather than a strict application of the theory.
They can only make decisions that generate enough income to pay the taxes
Out of curiosity, how is this different from current property taxes, or from mortgages for that matter?
“Government will make better resource decisions than profit-motivated private entities”
I think you landed on the crux of it - under the Georgist model, individuals (or firms) still make the decisions about what to do with the resources. What the government does is set a singular huge incentive, strongly in the direction of "add value to the land."
I don't have an answer to this question, but I would register a prediction:
The latter is mostly because there are a bunch of people who really hate communism and will prefer almost literally anything else in a survey.
I feel like suburban homeowners are the key group here. They have the most votes among landowning groups, and the strongest motivation to oppose anything that reduces property values because their home represents all of their wealth. There is also the way-of-life question, because the economics of the suburbs seem really difficult under Georgism.
Something like an exemption for the first sale after the tax is passed would be a simple solution to taking some of the sting out, and makes sure no one has to unilaterally lose their investment to a tax.
I would like to more about how the law views opportunity costs. For most things, such as liability, it seems to only accept costs in the normal sense of literally had to pay out of pocket X amount; for other things like worker's comp it is a defined calculation of lost future gains, but only from pre-existing arrangements like the job a person already had. It feels like the only time I see opportunity costs is lumped in with other intangibles like pain and suffering.