The Advocate's Arsenal

Read this before the debate

This is the fast path for the advocate who needs ammunition tonight. It is organized by what you are arguing for, and for every point it gives you three things: the strongest graded claim, the citation you can name out loud, and — most important — the one caveat an honest opponent will raise, so you concede it first and keep your credibility. The single rule of this wiki is that it persuades by being accurate. An advocate who overclaims gets burned; an advocate who says "here's the strong evidence, and here's the one honest limit" wins the room. Every grade below comes from the Evidence Dashboard; if anyone challenges how you know, send them to How We Verify.

Arguing FOR: housing affordability

Your strongest empirical footing. Lead with the diagnosis, then the remedy.

• Housing unaffordability is a land problem — Strong. Independent decompositions (a 140-year cross-country panel and US micro data) converge: the price of housing is overwhelmingly the price of land. Caveat: the claim is scoped to high-demand, supply-constrained markets.
• Split-rate taxation increases construction — Moderate–strong. Three Pennsylvania studies, the Pittsburgh natural experiment, and a Finnish natural experiment agree on direction. Caveat: a New Zealand null and a timing-neutrality critique keep it short of "proven."
• LVT improves housing affordability — Mixed. Lower land prices are well-supported; effects on rents paid are mixed. Caveat, and say it first: capture alone does not cheapen housing — Singapore and Hong Kong prove it — so pair LVT with permissive zoning. See the housing-capture objection.

Arguing FOR: fairness

The moral high ground, and it's also the best-evidenced ground on incidence.

• Landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants — Strong. Theory is near-unanimous that a tax on the land component cannot be shifted to renters; direct rental-market measurement supports it. This is your incidence knockout. Caveat: the direct measurement is thinner than the theory.
• LVT can be progressive — Strong. Land wealth is concentrated at the top; the tax can be designed progressive. Caveat: household-level incidence is design-dependent — one revenue-neutral case (Dover, NH) was regressive without a credit.
• The young are locked out of land wealth — Strong for the cohort trend across UK, US and OECD data. Caveat: reading it as a land transfer is analytic, not separately tested.
• Community creates land value — the moral narrative: the increment you'd tax is one nobody earned.

Arguing FOR: efficiency

For the economist in the room.

• LVT can replace capital taxes without efficiency loss — Strong (theory plus calibrated empirical models). A tax on fixed supply carries no deadweight loss.
• Deadweight loss and ATCOR — the mechanism: taxing land instead of labour or capital removes distortion rather than adding it.
• Taxing land raises productivity — Moderate. The least-harmful-tax evidence is well-supported. Caveat: the direct "raises productivity" claim is model-based and its magnitudes contested — argue the least-harmful version, not a strong productivity boost.

Arguing FOR: it works in practice

When the challenge is "name one place it actually worked."

• Resource-rent dividends work — Strong, decades of real-world operation (Alaska pays a dividend every year). Caveat: dividends are the easy part; broad rent capture is harder.
• Resource-rent capture works — Strong for Norway, conditional in general. Caveat: the resource curse is real where institutions are weak — capture is not automatic.
• Congestion pricing reduces traffic — Strong, repeated real-world quasi-experiments. Your proof that pricing a commons changes behavior as predicted.
• The Pittsburgh case — the split-rate story you can tell in one sentence.

When cornered, concede well

The objections most likely to be thrown at you, and the honest status to grant on the spot: the transition wealth shock is real and managed by phase-in; homeowner resistance is a genuine political obstacle answered by design; and at the frontier, taxing quasi-rents can dull innovation — which is exactly why the land case is the one to fight on. Conceding these makes your strong claims stronger.

Guides: Start Here · Evidence Dashboard · How We Verify Portals: Housing · Cycles & Crises · Tax Design · Climate & Commons · History & People · Case Studies · Objections Answered · The Rent Frontier