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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Even without the hypothetical AI effect on income, this is a proposal which will tax you 100% of the value of your property over a 40 year period whilst over the same period YC's LPs and founders will have paid just 2.5% of the [much higher] value of their companies.

Now there are efficiency arguments in favour of taxing land to encourage its use and not taxing productive enterprises or their investors too heavily, but this is pretty extreme...

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> which will tax you 100% of the value of your property

If it's a property tax, yes. If it's a land tax, no. Under land tax you tax the "ground rent" value of the land, not what's built on it. "Ground rent" is what it costs to rent out your land if it was an empty lot with nothing on it. Property tax and land tax are very different things with very different effects.

In high-demand cities, the land is the expensive part—not the house on top of it.

Right you are, and the land tax is specifically designed to destroy the speculative activity that causes it to increase forever.

How are we determining that the land value increased because of speculation, and not because the land continues to become exponentially more valuable do to its location in a popular area?

Yeah thats kinda the point.

The Georgist land value (which Altman suggests might be more practically replaced by a system linked to actual property transaction values) is still going to be a sufficiently large proportion of the value of a typical home to ensure pretty much anyone not living in a multistorey tenement block is paying massively higher tax rates on their home than anyone pays on a YC company.

One of the chief purposes of a land tax is to destroy the speculative activity which drives land prices up forever and ever.

As it should be. Single family homes are wasteful, they should cost more.

The entire point of land value taxes is to turn land into a liability. You don't get to benefit from the accomplishments of other people. You only get to benefit from your own accomplishments e.g. by building a multistory tenant block and renting it out.

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