Make complicated system, get complicated results. Taxes should be minimal, simple, and immediate.
If you want to tax business profit, you need the idea of business expense. Well, there are a lot of small business owners in this country. What is a business expense vs. a personal luxury for the owner?
If you want to tax asset appreciation, you need the idea of cost basis. If you don't want that to be arbitrarily cruel, you need the idea of capital loss, and capital loss carryover. Now you notice people are cheating, and you need the idea of wash sale.
A lot of this complexity is essential.
I also wonder if practices would emerge to make it impossible to know who to send the tax bill to.
Well, you could just publish the list of taxes due and make it the landowner's responsibility to pay it, seizing the land if the taxes aren't paid.
I don't think the government would really have to care about who owns the land, as long as the taxes were paid, right?
Not advocating Georgism, necessarily. I just don't see this issue as being a real problem with the idea.
Sounds like it's Socialist for land, but free-market for everything else. Who knows whether that's good or not, but it's at least a different approach and more interesting than the standard "Progressivism driving the speed limit" that we're used to.
A simple system will be inherently unfair.
To get a simple tax system you would need to make everything else simple as well.
There seem to be 3 general categories of taxes:
1. Incentives 2. Dis-incentives 3. Money to pay for services
Each needs to be examined for potentially unfair rules.
If thinking of an abstract incentive/disincentive structure, you could phrase it as ‘incentivizing those who support me to continue to support me’, and ‘disincentivized those who don’t support me from continuing to not support me’, but those are never the reasons given. To their point, the reasons given can or are often transparently be seen to be the more direct reason, but always have a smokescreen with rational justifications as to why they are not.
If you don’t look at underlying motivations, it’s easy to get caught up in the rational (smokescreen) reasons for something and chase your own tail endlessly without addressing the underlying causes. My 2c
Yes this gets into the meta game of taxes. Aka what actually happens is that the law that gets passed is the one that is the maximum benefit for the party in power that gives the minimum required to get the votes from the minority.
This is mostly true for any legislation though.
Taxes are pretty interesting laws in that they have become this massive catch-all place to push the economy around. It's an endless source of unintended consequences.