If you know something about Basic Income, you may be aware that one of the first proposals for a Basic Income came from Thomas Paine, hero of the American and French revolutions. In 1797, after a stint in a French prison, Paine wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice, which sets out an argument for taxing land and distributing the proceeds among the population at large as compensation for landlessness.
The major parties' policies are unlikely to resolve New Zealand's socio-economic issues unless they tax land, argue Zbigniew Dumieński and Nicholas Smith
The 2017 election is less than five weeks away and the key policy battles largely revolve around inequality, housing, transport, and education.
Provincial and federal budgets loom: taxation is a hot topic.
The price of living in a modern, civilized nation, it nevertheless rankles when part of our earnings are deducted leaving less to spend on our families, every purchase incurring sales tax making life more expensive and shrinking our purchasing power, every enterprise paying what feel like fines for success.
Some pundits perennially complain of being taxed into the poorhouse, even as they drive fancy convertibles or build expensive home studios.
Expensive farmland close to millions of people is best suited for school kids on field trips, families on farm vacations, and young people learning about agriculture, and for growing labour-intensive crops like organic vegetables, fruit, meat and eggs, not low-value crops like corn and soy.
There are two big problems with our property taxes: they are too high, and too low.
http://www.thebarrieexaminer.com/2013/02/13/tax-reform-badly-needed-in-…
How can that be? Well, it’s because in Ontario, as across Canada, property tax is actually two taxes: a tax on land, and a tax on buildings.
Taxing land value is fair, because a site’s value stems from the community around it; land rent is higher in the middle of a bustling city than in a quiet village, and higher in a town than in a remote wilderness.
Municipal governments should finance infrastructure by collecting the unearned income (economic rent) that accrues to land. No new taxes needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdE1umKfyJA
Warranted new projects (parks, schools, transit, roads, hospitals) always raise local land values more than the cost of the project. Presently this wealth disappears into the pockets of local land owners. Instead, Land Value Taxation should be used to finance the infrastructure.
Why we need land value taxation.
A Telling Silence www.monbiot.com
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd January 2013
You can learn as much about a country from its silences as you can from its obsessions. The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do. While the government’s cuts beggar the vulnerable and gut public services, it’s time to talk about the turns not taken, the opportunities foregone: the taxes which could have spared us every turn of the screw.
Letter to the Editor: Increased transfer payments are not the best way to address Toronto’s grotesque income disparity, as Wayne Roberts suggests (NOW, October 4-10).
Transfer payments are financed by taxing jobs, businesses and sales, which damages the economy by killing jobs, punishing successful businesses and raising the cost of products we all need.
Who is property speculation really good for? With global economies stressing as property values plunge and banks write down their books, this film gives an alternative to the push for austerity.
Real Estate 4 Ransom is a documentary about global property speculation and its impact on the economy. Real Estate 4 Ransom considers the changing motivations behind property investment and challenges the notion that the Global Financial Crisis was caused by bank lending alone.
The Aim of Liberal Democrat Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform (ALTER):
"To improve the understanding of and support for Land Value Taxation amongst members of the Liberal Democrats; to encourage all Liberal Democrats to promote and campaign for this policy as part of a more sustainable and just resource based economic system in which no one is enslaved by poverty; and to cooperate with other bodies, both inside and outside the Liberal Democrat Party, who share these objectives."
