Steven Cord

Overview

Steven B. Cord (died April 20, 2020, reportedly aged 91, implying a birth year of roughly 1928–29) was an American historian and one of the most consequential scholar-activists in the modern Georgist movement.[1][2] He held a bachelor's degree from the Bernard Baruch School of Business at City College and graduate degrees from Columbia University Teachers College, and spent 25 years as a professor of American history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he won a distinguished faculty award for research.[1] Alongside his academic career, Cord founded and directed the Center for the Study of Economics (CSE) and served as President and Research Director of the Henry George Foundation of America, using both as platforms for empirical land-rent research and direct legislative advocacy for land value taxation.[2]

Land-Rent Revenue Research

Cord's central scholarly project was estimating the size of the US land-rent tax base directly from Census and Federal Reserve data. His paper "How Much Revenue Would a Full Land Value Tax Yield? In the United States in 1981, Census and Federal Reserve Data Indicate It Would Nearly Equal All Taxes," published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in 1985, argued that a comprehensive land value tax could have raised revenue comparable to the entire tax take of that year.[3] Fred Harrison's The Power in the Land (1983) cites an earlier series of Cord estimates of US land rental income — roughly $228 billion for 1975, at least $440 billion and possibly $600 billion for 1980, and approximately $1,020 billion for 1982 (a figure Harrison describes as nearly double total government revenue that year) — drawn from Cord's paper "The Rent-Revenue Potential of the United States."[4] Lars Doucet's Land Is a Big Deal also cites Cord's work in its own discussion of land rent's scale relative to national income.[5] Cord later compiled "The Evidence in Favor of Taxing Land Values: 233 Empirical Studies" (2010), a bibliographic survey of the empirical LVT literature.[2] These figures fed directly into the wiki's broader debate over whether land rent is sufficient to fund government; see Land Rent Could Fund Government.

Pennsylvania Two-Rate Advocacy

Cord is remembered chiefly for turning LVT theory into local practice: working municipality by municipality and school district by school district within Pennsylvania's state-level enabling legislation for optional split-rate ("two-rate") property taxation, which taxes land value at a materially higher rate than building value. Secondary biographical sources credit him with helping induce on the order of a dozen or more Pennsylvania jurisdictions to adopt some form of two-rate taxation, collectively raising tens of millions of dollars annually in additional land-value-based revenue.[2] The best-documented statewide tally comes from Mark Alan Hughes's Lincoln Institute study (2006), which counts, across the whole period since 1913, 33 Pennsylvania municipalities that engaged with split-rate taxation: 16 with split rates then in force, 5 that had rescinded them, and 12 that considered but never adopted them (see Pennsylvania).[6] That 33/16/5 count is the verified figure for the state as a whole — it is not itself an attribution to Cord — but Pennsylvania's unusually large cluster of two-rate jurisdictions, which at various points included Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, is widely credited in Georgist secondary literature substantially to Cord's decades of direct lobbying rather than to any single statewide reform.[2] A Cord-specific count isolating the jurisdictions his advocacy directly produced, and the ~$70 million/year added-revenue figure reported by some secondary sources, remain unconfirmed against a primary CSE or municipal record, and so are not asserted here as attributable to Cord alone.

See Also

• Pennsylvania
• Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
• Pittsburgh
• Split-Rate Taxation
• Land Rent Could Fund Government
• Harrison, The Power in the Land
• Land Is a Big Deal

Sources

1. Steven Cord obituary, Baltimore Sun, published via Legacy.com, April 2020. Legacy.com — used for his education, his 25-year professorship in American history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and his death on April 20, 2020, at age 91. This page could not be independently fetched in full during this research pass; the details above are drawn from search-engine-indexed excerpts of the obituary text rather than a directly read full document.
2. "Steven Cord," Henry George School of Social Science historical collections. hgarchives.org — used for his roles as President/Research Director of the Henry George Foundation of America and founder of the Center for the Study of Economics, and for the reported figures on Pennsylvania two-rate jurisdictions and added revenue. This archival page could not be independently fetched in full during this research pass; the details above are drawn from search-engine-indexed excerpts.
3. Steven Cord, "How Much Revenue Would a Full Land Value Tax Yield? In the United States in 1981, Census and Federal Reserve Data Indicate It Would Nearly Equal All Taxes," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 44, No. 3 (July 1985), pp. 279–293. JSTOR 3486038 · full text (cooperative-individualism.org) — the primary external source for the title, journal, volume/issue/pages, and year of the central revenue-sufficiency claim. The full-text PDF is freely hosted (JSTOR stable URL 3486038); the paper's detailed argument and underlying Census/Federal Reserve data were not line-by-line re-derived for this stub.
4. Fred Harrison, The Power in the Land, Shepheard-Walwyn, 1983, Ch. 16 — a discovery source for this page; used for Cord's US land-rental-income estimate series (1975/1980/1982), citing Cord's paper "The Rent-Revenue Potential of the United States."
5. Lars Doucet, Land Is a Big Deal, Ch. 14 — a discovery source for this page; cited (via this wiki's discovery notes on the book) for further reference to Cord's land-rent-as-share-of-national-income estimates. The specific figure and page have not been independently re-confirmed against the book's full text in this research pass.
6. Mark Alan Hughes (2006), "Why So Little Georgism in America: Using the Pennsylvania Case Files to Understand the Slow, Uneven Progress of Land Value Taxation," Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper WP06ZK1 — the verified source for the statewide split-rate tally ("33 municipalities: 16 that have current split rates, 5 that have rescinded split rates, and 12 that have considered but never implemented split rates"). Full text read for this wiki's Pennsylvania page. PDF — note this is a whole-state count, not a Cord-specific attribution.