Land tax advocate wants to be Ohio Governor
Bill Peirce, a senior economist who has long endorsed the land tax as sound public policy, is running for Governor of Ohio. He's quoted in this article from 2003.
No Surprise: TIFs seem to discourage development nearby
TIF (Tax Increment Financing) is a device claimed to encourage development. In theory, you start with an area that has stagnated, where there is little or no construction. You pretend that in order to get development, you need to encourage it by spending money. And you'll raise the money by taxing the development that wil occur. In order to do this, you promise that, to the extent the real estate tax base increases in the area, you'll use the resulting revenue to pay for the money you spent to encourage the development. (That means that just about no increase will go to community-wide service such as schools, police, fire, etc.)
This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. Landowners figure out that if they don't build anything for a while, they'll be able to get a subsidy (this is in addition to the subsidy they already get in the form of favorable tax treatment for holding land vacant.) And even if they are inclined to build, they'll have difficulty getting permission if local officials have targeted an area for a particular sort of redevelopment.
Now the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has published an article by economists David Merriman (Loyola University) and Richard F. Dye (Lake Forest College), summarizing their own and others' analyses of TIFs in Illinois. Highlights from their conclusion:
We find evidence that the non-TIF areas of municipalities that use TIF grow no more rapidly, and perhaps more slowly, than simillar municipalities that do not use TIF. Policy makers should use TIF with caution. It is, after all, merely a way of financing economic development and does not change the opportunities for development or the skills of those doing the developmnet planning.... Our evidence shows that commercial TIF districts reduce commercial property value growth in the non-TIF parts of the same municipality. This is not terribly surprising..."
Further sales tax confusions
I've been in the habit of buying very large cups of coffee at
Starbucks, 55 E. Jackson. for $1.80 plus 18c tax for a total of
$1.98. Due to the long line there this afternoon, I went to
Barnes and Noble, 1 E. Jackson, where very large cups of coffee also
cost $1.80. But they charge only 16c tax. I wonder why the
difference.
Who innovated the sales tax?
According to this article, the nation's first sales tax was imposed by Mississippi, in 1932.
"SinceSlicedBread" top ideas are hardly innovative
Well, the judges at sinceslicedbread.com have selected their 21 "best" ideas, and I gotta say they're really disappointing. I needn't comment further, since others have done so. I don't even know if I'm going to vote for any of these.
EC Finds Idea Privilege Stunts Innovation
The claimed purpose for protection of intellectual "property" is that
it will encourage innovation. If you're guaranteed the exclusive
privilege to use the database you compiled, for instance, won't that
encourage people to compile more such databases, making them available
(for a fee, of course) to those who can benefit from their use?
It
seems that in the European Union, where databases are protected in this
way, the European Commission has done a study, comparing their database
protection practice with the U. S. laws that, so far, prohibit
copyright of a simple compilation of facts. Best I can tell, they
found that there's more innovation where the database can't be copyrighted. As boingboing puts it, In the US, no database rights
have yielded the largest databases in the world (Amazon, Google, the
Internet Archive, etc) and more investment in and more profits from
databases. Reported in Financial Times.
A Fed economist on Henry George
Thanks to Marie Bousfield for pointing out Robert L. Formaini's Henry George: Antiprotectionist Giant of American Economics (pdf) published by the Dallas Fed. It's basically sympathetic to George, (and includes imagery I hadn't seen before), but doesn't seem to make the distinction between free trade and the "Free Trade Agreements" desired by political influentials. (The difference, of course, is that actual free trade doesn't require any international agreements, but merely a decision by those nations who wish to participate that they won't have tariffs, quotas, or similar controls on international trade.)
Formaini repeats the confusion that "as total government expenditures rise, no tax on land alone can finance that spending." But when one thinks about it, if government expenditures rise without limit then obviously they reach a point where they exceed taxable capacity of land.
History of the Monopoly Game
Thanks to Richard Biddle of the Philadelphia Henry George School for mentioning a comprehensive Monopoly game history site. Originally called "The Landlords Game," Monopoly was intended to illustrate how, if the community fails to collect the rent, a few become wealthy and the rest of us must struggle. Although strategy can help or hurt, the main determinant of who prospers is luck, both in the game and in life.
The history is in fact scandalous, as detailed on the site.
