Thursday, November 11, 2010

Land: a problem, and a solution

Britain has a problem.
A group of 36,000 individuals – only 0.6 per cent of the population – own 50 per cent of rural land.
Inequality is bad for a country. And Britain and many other countries with similar problems have a very simple solution available.

1 Comments:

Blogger Robin Smith said...

Good point. Take great care to point out this is not about taxing land. It is about taxing land "values".

The former is highly regressive. The latter highly progressive.

Also a point to note is that by pointing out the ancient aristocracy we are dangerously taking attention off the 21st century aristocracy. The banks.

Real Reform: Banks Are The 21st Century Landlords

Why are banks bankrupt? Most of the collateral they have for loans is land value.

Why are they landlords? Because the interest they charge on nowadays unredeemable "loans" is actually the rental stream de-capitalised from the location value of the collateral.

I think its time we modernised our thought on this central point.

Banks are bad because they are landlords above all else. Yes they are huge tax avoiders too. But the biggest tax they avoid is on the unearned incomes from their rental stream. (~£200 billion annually)

8:40 am  

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