On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:28:47 +0100, ask@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(PeterBP) wrote:
>RogerDodger <none@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 01:41:25 +0100, ask@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(PeterBP) wrote:
>>
>> >RogerDodger <none@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Rent for
>> >> improvements to real estate goes under the table, or is sharply
>> >> reduced in back-room deals (I slash your rent, you hire my wife for
a
>> >> no-show job, etc.)
>> >
>> >Roger,
>> >
>> >your post has some good points, but here you confuse the
common-parlance
>> >rent (such as that for monthly tenure in a flat) with economic rent,
and
>> >specifically the land rent.
>> >
>> >Land rent is not easy to hide.
>>
>> Sure it is. It's quite easy to hide.
>>
>> Land is difficult to hide. Buildings are even more difficult to hide.
>
>It's the other way around. Buildings are difficult to hide, land is
>impossible to hide.
I dunno, to my eyes the Empire State Building seems rather more
readily visible than the land under it, but maybe that's just me.
Regardless...
>....
>> But building rent is easy to hide. If high taxes or rent controls are
>> imposed on it, building owners just take rent another way -- under-
>> the-table payments, traded favors, contractual arrangments under which
>> rent received is reduced but income received for other services
>> provided is increased, etc., etc.
>
>And again, its not the kind of rent I'm discussing.
Oh. Are you discussing some kind of rent not paid in money or
arrangements with money value?
>> We all know this.
>>
>> Land rent is even *easier* to hide. All the same options exist as with
>> building rent *plus* the extra option of allocating the bulk of the
>> value of real estate to the buildings on it and away from the land.
>
>Are trades in land public or not? How do you bid on a plot of land
>otherwise?
Individually, buyer to seller, of course. These are unique individual
properties, not commodities like corn. (Though if you put a
confiscatory tax on corn sales you'd certainly get "off market" sales
of it too.)
With a high tax rate on the transaction, you bid the the same way
you'd bid on a building, or apartment, or semi-truck, a Mickey Mantle
rookie baseball card, or anything else with a high tax on it that
reduces the return to the seller.
You've heard of "key money" for real estate, right? You think it
exists only for buildings, not land?
The seller says:
"This'd have a free market price of $100x, but the tax on what I'd
get is 50%. So we can work out a deal where you pay less than $100x
and I get more than $50x after tax -- and we both come out ahead.
Let's haggle!"
So they agree on a for-the-record-price well below the free market
price supplemented by a back door payment, for which the buyer gets
the key to the property. Maybe a for-the-record price of $60 with $30
going tax-free by the back door, so they each make $10 at the cost of
the tax collector. That's a good 40% of the tax expected -- 40% gone!
Of course everybody else is doing the same thing for the same reasons.
What happens "comparable sale" values then?
Note that the back-door payment doesn't have to be anything as gauche
as cash under the table. Any kind or business or personal arrangement
sending a benefit the other way will do.
C'mon, it's not like there is any lack of experience with this being
fully do***ented in markets in the real world.
What's so difficult about it to understand? Black markets are endemic
when prices to sellers are reduced well below free market rates.
Georgists seem to think they somehow are taxing "land" so tax money is
going to arise *poof* out of the ground in a way that can't be hidden.
Of course, they really are taxing contractual relation****ps between
people. And those can be changed, hidden, in a myriad of ways.
Regarding land as easily as anything else (in fact easier than most).
If you really think you are taxing land go out to a piece of land and
say: "Land! Land! I tax you, cough up some money!"
>
>snip
So why did you cut my reference to Michael Hudson saying land value
has already been reduced *today* by 50% by firms ****fting value from
land to other assets for tax benefits, using just these methods?
If you think that's impossible, he's wrong, he doesn't know what "land
rent" is, say so.
But snipping and ignoring -- tut, tut, that's just hiding from the
issue.
Lets restore it ...
~~
So, as per the Fed and Hudson, we have the choice of either:
A) Land rent can't be hidden, and is around of 4% of GDP.
B) Land rent can be easily hidden, is almost 9% of GDP, but is fully
half-hidden now -- and those who are now succesfully hiding so much of
it will of course have a *huge* incentive to hide even more of it as
it becomes subject to a confiscatory tax.
Make your choice, which do you prefer?
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