Nobelist Stiglitz Calls for George's Tax
Irish Austerity Plan Includes Land Tax
| Is geoism catching on? We trim, blend, and append six 2010 articles from: (1) BBC, Nov 24, on Irish austerity; (2) Left Foot Forward, Nov 24, on Irish taxes by Will Straw; (3) Smart Taxes, Nov 25, on the site value tax by Coordinator Dara McHugh; (4) P2P, Nov 22, on shifting the property tax by Michel Bauwens; (5) Our Fiscal Security, a joint project of Demos, The Century Foundation, and the Economic Policy Institute, Nov 30, on the George tax by Joe Stiglitz (via reader Dr. Polly Cleveland of Columbia U); and (6) Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Sept 16, on Common Ownership of the Earth by John Tessitore, editor, and Mathias Risse, Harvard University, interviewee. |
by BBC, by Straw, by McHugh, by Bauwens, by Stiglitz, and by Tessitore & Risse
- Irish unveil tough austerity plan
The Irish government has unveiled a range of tough austerity measures designed to help solve the country's debt crisis.
Among the spending cuts and tax rises are a reduction in the minimum wage, a new property tax, and thousands of public sector job cuts.
Key points of the recovery plan include:
* 24,750 public sector jobs cuts
* 2.8bn euros of savings in social welfare spending
* 1.9bn euros to be raised from income tax changes
* 1 euro cut in the minimum wage to 7.65 euros an hour
* VAT rise from 21% to 22% in 2013, and to 24% in 2014
* the corporation tax rate remains unchanged at 12.5%
* a new "site value" property tax to raise 200 euros from most homeowners by 2014.
- Ireland’s austerity: poor pay to keep corporation tax low
Perhaps the only positive from today’s package is the introduction of a “site value tax” on land. Economist Philippe Legrain tweets that it’s, “a reform the UK and others should emulate”. Legrain is author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them and Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis.
- Site Value Tax will Stop another Property Bubble
Ireland's organization, Smart Taxes, are happy to see that the Government's Four-Year Plan includes a commitment to implement Site Value Tax by 2012, with a subsequent extension to include commercial rates. We'll be doing our best to make sure that the tax is understood and that disinformation does not prevail. Please get in touch for more information.
JJS: Other Europeans also discuss shifting the property tax.
- Shifting the tax burden from buildings to land
We should not so much tax the productive efforts of people, but the use of the natural resources, argues Jeffery Smith [this editor], so wrote Michel Bauwens, Belgian commentator active in P2P. Founded in Holland, P2P studies the impact of peer-to-peer technology and thought on society and aims to be a pluralist network to document, research, and promote peer-to-peer alternatives. click here
JJS: While some push taxing one part of nature -- land surface -- others push recovering the socially-generated value of another part of nature -- buried resources.
- Stiglitz advocates 100% Henry George tax on resources
In a Washington DC press conference, on a live webcast, responding to the Deficit Commission, Joseph Stiglitz -- “Nobel” laureate in economics and ex-Chief Economist at the World Bank and author of the Henry George Theorem which shows that public works could be self-financing -- proposed a "Henry George tax" on all natural resources, to collect 100% of the rent click here . He writes what he said in “Principles and Guidelines for Deficit Reduction”, which he gave at a Roosevelt Institute event in New York click here .
JJS: On what moral grounds could society recover the worth of Earth?
- Risse on Justice and Common Ownership of the Earth
John Tessitore: You talk about common ownership of the earth -- that is, the equal claim of each person to the planet and its resources. In what sense does humanity own the earth? How do we do so collectively?
Mathias Risse: This idea that humanity collectively owns the earth is an idea that a few hundred years ago, was the guiding theme of political thought. One reason why this idea was so attractive to people then was that the idea of this was based in the Old Testament, and the Old Testament was a pretty stable starting point.
JT: How did you follow this road to a fundamentally egalitarian view in the 21st century?
MR: The spaces and resources of the earth are simply there. These resources and spaces are needed by each one of us for survival. So any two human beings have symmetrical entitlements to the earth.
I am reluctant to use the word "equality". My preferred version I call common ownership. There has to be a guarantee for an equal opportunity to use the earth.
If we have this idea that humanity collectively owns the earth, then a very natural follow-up thought to that is to say, okay, this means that not any small number of people can do as they please with any chunk of three-dimensional space. click here
JJS: One way to share Earth is to share her worth. Seems to work OK in Alaska where every resident receives an oil dividend. That state also has the narrowest income gap in the US.
The complete package of replacing taxes with fees and dues that redirect all the money that society spends on the nature it uses into the public treasury, in lieu of taxes on our efforts, then sends those funds back out again as dividends to members of society, in lieu of subsidized “services” (whether you wanted them or not), goes by the name of geonomics.
A decade ago, the Irish Green Party were the most geonomic of all Green Parties. One wonders if they helped set the stage for the current Government’s plan to tax land value.
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Editor Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
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Also see: Tax to improve plans
Mainstream Media Promote Real Land Rights
Some Kyrgyz disapprove of renting land to Kazakhstan |
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