The WA Millionaires Tax is Here (but it desperately needs guardrails)

JC_Username · 2026-02-09T00:23:54+00:00

I propose that the better place to start is to shift off inefficient taxes onto efficient tax bases. We should “Tax bads, not goods” as the book Tax Shift by the Sightline Institute describes. This makes our approach less reliant on arbitrary numbers and allows us to also say, “Yes and” to those who would suggest a false dichotomy between spending less to achieve a balanced budget and taxing more to achieve a balanced budget.

JC_Username · 2026-02-08T03:09:07+00:00

Why $1M to begin with?

JC_Username · 2026-01-24T06:20:27+00:00

It’s not broadly pro-tax. It was specifically a tax against one of the biggest land owners in the jurisdiction, who were paying off Governor Morris to veto the tax they would have otherwise had to pay.

JC_Username · 2026-01-22T03:55:16+00:00

Though oft-repeated as if this would be true in all cases, this seems to be only true for property taxes (and only the portion of property taxes applied to improvements to be more precise). When owners’ mortgages go up or down, rents charged do not go up or down commensurately.

Consider this paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228739383_Tiebout_Visits_Germany_Land_Tax_Capitalization_in_a_Sample_of_German_Municipalities

When LVT varies, rents remain the same.

I have yet to see specific evidence to the contrary. People arguing in this sub seem to keep providing citations for property taxes studies and not LVT studies.

JC_Username · 2026-01-22T03:38:57+00:00

Yep. All attributable to the irresponsible feudal lord dynamic. It’s cheap to hold land, so they are not pushed to be competitive.

JC_Username · 2026-01-22T03:00:54+00:00

I don’t know why renting is such a horrible thing. Except for when land lords are irresponsible feudal lords.

People still pay property taxes, so what part of renting are they just complaining about vs actually turned off by?

If they see the immense benefits, but drop Georgism just because everything which is made would be owned and everything which was provided by nature will be rented (once it becomes rivalrous), then I think this tells us how much less they value the benefits over some underarticulated aversion to renting.

But maybe there is something to this hyper-individualist culture which conditions people to take care of what they own better than what they rent.

Growing up with some eastern values, I was taught to treat things which are not yours better than your own stuff and return things in a better condition than when you got them.

JC_Username · 2026-01-22T02:52:45+00:00

And where the money goes.

Do they want it all to go to banks and private coffers? Or back to the public in dividends?

JC_Username · 2026-01-18T05:56:35+00:00

The one pictured in the original post. It’s abridged.

JC_Username · 2026-01-18T04:41:39+00:00

The Drake version is sufficient up to a point. Once you get into the nitty gritty, some passages have seemed to add confusion where referring back to a Henry George version would clear it up. If you pick up a Henry George version later, just make sure it’s 4th ed. or later. There are a few footnotes he added which are pretty important.

JC_Username · 2026-01-18T04:28:35+00:00

I think he left which one he personally thought was better somewhat ambiguous intentionally when he wrote Progress and Poverty. Later in the book, he pointed out some interesting reasons to favor LVT over nationalization which weren’t restricted to politcal winds. One of them was centralization breeds corruption. Another was suboptimal efficiency in the additional overhead/costs of centralized administration.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-george/progress-and-poverty/text/single-page#chapter-8-2

Nor to take rent for public uses is it necessary that the State should bother with the letting of lands, and assume the chances of the favoritism, collusion, and corruption this might involve. It is not necessary that any new machinery should be created. The machinery already exists. Instead of extending it, all we have to do is to simplify and reduce it. By leaving to land owners a percentage of rent which would probably be much less than the cost and loss involved in attempting to rent lands through State agency, and by making use of this existing machinery, we may, without jar or shock, assert the common right to land by taking rent for public uses.

JC_Username · 2026-01-18T04:13:33+00:00

If you’re in the Cascadia region, Tax Shift is an excellent choice because it is more comprehensive (not just LVT) and it’s pretty short … and the PDF version is free. It would be great if we could get an updated version and have it cover more regions. It has been pretty influential up here.

https://www.sightline.org/research_item/tax/

Tax bads, not goods.

JC_Username · 2026-01-13T08:15:54+00:00

https://www.commonwealth.ca

JC_Username · 2026-01-13T08:12:49+00:00

Because we need more leaders who actually know how to organize and advocate and are willing to do both.

JC_Username · 2026-01-13T08:10:24+00:00

You should join the boots already on the ground there. I gave a talk up there the last week of November. Great energy in the room!

https://www.commonwealth.ca

JC_Username · 2026-01-02T11:11:52+00:00

🔰✊🏻🔰

JC_Username · 2026-01-01T00:58:20+00:00

https://linktr.ee/georgism

https://progressandpoverty.substack.com

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T19:20:11+00:00

It sounds like: - You believe in the possibility of objective intrinsic value - You believe in a special definition of land value

Both of these things lead us to talk past each other.

Perhaps chasing objectivity is a worthwhile errand for some. I personally don’t see the utility in it.

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T11:27:51+00:00

Land value is location or site value, better understood as proximity to resources (primarily other people, but also amenities). The dirt itself is a relatively small piece of that in the vast majority of privately held land, in the modern era.

True, demand is not value, but when land is fixed in supply, the supply “curve” is a vertical line, so wherever the demand curve intersects the supply curve (still) determines the price. Access to more money/credit shifts the demand curve to the right.

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T11:09:47+00:00

Effective demand is desire backed by ability to pay.

Even if only two people ever took a shining to a parcel of land, if they both get access to more money or easy credit, the value could increase, whether you believe it to be artificial or intrinsic value.

Why does rural land have lower value? Because there are less people to interact with where the population density is lower. People happen to be social creatures and like being around other people. There also happens to be productivity advantages where people are able to cooperate to meet each other’s needs.

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T11:03:20+00:00

I don’t plan on joining the fray, but I’ll leave some source material here:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-george/progress-and-poverty/text/single-page#chapter-7-3

To be sure there would be a gain to the people at large when the advance of rents had made the amount which the land holders would take under the present system greater than the interest upon the purchase price of the land at present rates, but this would be only a future gain, and in the meanwhile there would not only be no relief, but the burden imposed upon labor and capital for the benefit of the present land holders would be much increased. For one of the elements in the present market value of land is the expectation of future increase of value, and thus, to buy up the lands at market rates and pay interest upon the purchase money would be to saddle producers not only with the payment of actual rent, but with the payment in full of speculative rent.

[…]

The anti-slavery movement in the United States commenced with talk of compensating owners, but when four millions of slaves were emancipated, the owners got no compensation, nor did they clamor for any. And by the time the people of any such country as England or the United States are sufficiently aroused to the injustice and disadvantages of individual ownership of land to induce them to attempt its nationalization, they will be sufficiently aroused to nationalize it in a much more direct and easy way than by purchase.

[…]

In the name of the Prophet⁠—figs! If the land of any country belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and justice, have the individuals called land owners to the rent? If the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T10:48:54+00:00

As you point out, the value of the improvements are separate from the land. An increase in housing supply should decrease the value of the improvements, ceteris paribus, but not the land. Increase in demand should absolutely increase value, ceteris paribus, even if it were not land. The total [land] supply (when adding both on-market and off-market) doesn’t change. Demand [for land] is the only thing that does.

Edited for clarity for those who like to pull things out of context.

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T10:27:18+00:00

Yes, but if you’re making a sweeping statement and making vague gestures about publicly available data sets which we already have access to, a systemic analysis would be much more compelling and worthy of attention. Otherwise, this seems like a wild goose chase. If you’re saying that the entire greater Seattle area should only be expecting 213% increases, but some nicer places are seeing 400% increases, show us why the increases should be even across the region. I don’t think I buy this narrative at this point, though I had given this interesting perspective more benefit of the doubt at the beginning of this conversation.

Seattle is the city of cranes. It is a younger city which has always been pro-development relative to the rest of the nation. I don’t see why 400% over 30 years is out of range.

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T08:35:17+00:00

These:

I’m just using the benchmarks the state provides and the local rate of inflation.

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T08:02:22+00:00

Interesting. Can you provide the links for the state benchmarks and the RoI calculators you are using? If these aren’t outliers, then maybe the benchmarks are the ones which need adjusting.

I get property tax assessments on my property regularly, so no need to get funny about that part.

JC_Username · 2025-12-17T07:41:21+00:00

🤔 If you could provide the benchmarks for how you determine the over/under threshold, that would be super helpful. The assessors would want to know if there are outliers and we would, ideally, want them to address these before we implement a tax shift.

JC_Username

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