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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

What? It is trivial to shift the economic burden. As en employer I only hire remote: my employees now have to waste space having a home office.

As a home owner I want a garden, but I don't want to pay for it so I build it on top of my house and make a basement to put my car in - I now shifted something like 8/10 of my tax burden because I use less land.

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You have shifted the burden by giving up on a resource that is valuable to society around you. That may well be an equitable trade. The point is you won't get rid of the tax without giving something back to society in return.

Now, I don't believe that this is sufficient as an alternative to all other taxes, but it does have many desirable properties, and your suggested behavioural changes are amongst them: Optimizing usage of land.

Yeah but I have done that by lowering my tax contribution too. In fact if I move into one of the new mega-super-skyscrapers that this will surely result in I may end up paying so little in taxes (because so many people will share the ground) that it won't be enough to pay for the police and fireservices, which surely will go up because it is more expensive and difficult to fight fires in so tall buildings.

So in effect I have shifted most of my tax-burden off to others, land will have very little value (because it will have to be taxed more and more heavily).

Of course you can mix it with older taxes, but then you have the problems you had with them too.

It's relative to the value of the land though. The value of the small area your skyscraper occupies in downtown Manhattan or wherever is probably extremely valuable. Thus, high land taxes to be split among the occupants. It's hard to say whether your tax burden would go up or down without hard numbers, though.

Keep in mind that the land value would be the factor determining your proportion of the the overall tax income. If tax receipts go down, then the amount of tax charged per unit of land value would go up. At some point you will be unable to use less land without incurring far higher costs - e.g. tacking on ten floors on that skyscraper will require complex enough construction methods to not be cost effective. That's before considering any kind of planning consent.

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