I argued for a gradual implementation of Georgist Tax Policies elsewhere in the thread so we are in agreement. I think transitioning to a LVT is a very hard problem that requires a great deal of thought and care. I'm convinced such a transition needs to be gradual because instantaneous is far too destructive. I'm also leaning towards government needing to compensate at least some of those who lose significantly in the transition. I'm open to being proven wrong about either point but the proposals I've seen from Georgists advocating instantaneous change seem woefully ill informed or quite naive about consequences.
I'm a huge fan of instantaneous change, as it instantly sets the incentives, but am willing to have a large transition period.
If we were to do an instant change, the best way to do that is to give everyone a tax credit equal to the value of their existing land, with retirees and others who need public support having a few more options to convert those tax credits to cash.
Instantaneous change with compensation is extremely expensive. I noted in another thread that it's quite possible for the costs of compensating affected parties to reach $30.5 trillion, the current size of the US national debt. This assumed compensation had a needs component to it and only half of the US property market was compensated.
The basic issue is the current US property market is estimated at $33.6 trillion. If you assume 80% of that is land value you end up needing to compensate 26.88 trillion. On the other side of the market you have mortgages you put under water that people will walk away from. The mortgage market in the US is $17.6 trillion. If you assume 80% of mortgages are walked away from and the mortgages end up 70% underwater you end up having to compensate $9.856 trillion dollars. So solving the residential portion of compensation potentially costs $36.736 trillion dollars. If you have compensation in the commercial and industrial land markets as well that makes things even more expensive.
Right, so you could see that 30 trillion + commercial number as a loan that the federal government is taking out that they only need to pay the interest on as it accrues(as people spend their land tax credits). This is something the federal government can handle, as the system will more than pay for itself over the lifetime of the tax credits.
A tax credit that gets subtracted when the homeowner defaults equal to the value of the default would resolve the walk-away problem.
The issue is the gains in efficiency from the introduction of the Georgian tax system get traded off against the loss in efficiency from more than doubling the national debt. I don't have enough economic skill to model all of this to know whether we end up ahead or behind but my intuition is the effect sizes may be similar in a number of key dimensions.
I agree you can modify how the tax credits work to potentially transfer the mortgage loss credits from the homeowner to the mortgage holder when the homeowner walks away. If you do this effectively you can reduce the cost by nearly $10 trillion but still have around $25 trillion in residential costs.
