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Because land ownership is concentrated among the wealthy, a land value tax falls disproportionately on high-wealth households — making it both efficient and progressive.
High urban land rents price the most productive workers and firms out of the best locations, misallocating labour and capital and lowering aggregate productivity.
Causal evidence from Mexico shows raising property-tax rates increases welfare — though coercive enforcement, unlike rate increases, can reduce it.
Estimates of total land rent suggest it could fund a substantial fraction — by some accounts most — of government, though figures are sensitive to assumptions.
By discouraging speculation and encouraging development, LVT can ease housing costs — but only alongside permissive land-use policy; capturing land value alone need not lower prices.
By imposing an annual cost on holding land, LVT reduces the incentive to hold sites idle for speculative gain — shrinking the booms and busts of the land cycle.
Because land supply is fixed, the economic incidence of a land value tax falls on the landowner — it cannot be shifted to tenants through higher rents.
Shifting tax from capital to land raises welfare: land taxes carry no deadweight loss while capital taxes discourage investment.
The much-discussed rise in capital's share of income is, on decomposition, overwhelmingly a rise in the value of land under housing — vindicating a core Georgist claim.
Under optimal conditions, the land rent generated by public goods equals their cost — so capturing land rent can finance them with no other tax.
Transit lines, parks, and public services raise the value of nearby land — the empirical foundation for the Henry George Theorem and land value capture.
Alaska's decades-long Permanent Fund Dividend shows that capturing natural-resource rent and distributing it as a citizen's dividend is administratively and politically durable.
Across US case studies, shifting property tax off buildings and onto land is followed by more construction — the effect Georgist theory predicts.