Georgism Comes Home to California. (Maybe.)

A Georgist tax-reform measure hopes to gather signatures for a referendum in California, which — you may have heard — is broke.

It’s a progressive and radical idea: Abolish income tax for people making under $150,000, cap income tax at 8 percent, and raise money through a 75 percent tax on the “fair-market monthly rental value” of plots of land, regardless of improvements on top. I don’t have an opinion on the details yet, but commenters at Daily Kos seem unaware of how powerful the plan could be. For a start, in theory it would: 1) cut taxes for most people, 2) shift the tax base to its natural center, which is the value of land itself, and 3) deflate any current or future real-estate bubbles in California.

Real-estate speculation was — you may have heard — the root of the current financial crisis.

UPDATE: More on Georgism here, here, and here.

     posted 23 November 2009 by Michael Scott Moore