Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (399)

As a warm-up for the big fourth centenary edition, Ben Jamin emailed me this, from the comments to an article at the Tax Justice Network:

Nick Shaxson says:

put all your assets overseas where there isn’t an LVT, and if LVT is your only tax, then you can escape tax entirely, hey presto! May we wearily remind you that we support LVT but only as part of a comprehensive tax system. The LVT-only brigade are doing the LVT cause a great disservice through their extremism.

He is presumably one of these deluded people who think that where the records are kept is where the “wealth” is. These people believe that there really is trillions of dollars hidden in tax havens, or that land can be moved offshore. Nonsense, the reason for this is to disguise ownership, in the real world, nothing has moved anywhere.

Returning to the KLN, let’s imagine that every landowner in the UK tries to sell up to avoid the LVT liability… to whom are they going to sell? If nobody wants to own it, the land goes to the Crown (in practice, Crown Estates) under the normal bono vacantia rule and the problem solves itself. In future we would all just pay rent to Crown Estates, which is a government body (we’d have to greatly reduce the % of Crown Estates income paid to the Queen is all) and the government spends that money and collects correspondingly less in taxes on income etc.

So actually, if people were dumb enough to waive their titles, things would be a lot easier for the UK government, there would be no need to assess the site-only element of rental values, the government is just a landlord charging market rent with full control over evictions procedures.

Clearly, people wouldn’t all abandon their titles, we know this because 98% of Business Rates (in practice it is like LVT, it is just calculated incorrectly) are paid every year.

And few realistic proponents said that LVT would be the only tax for the time being, it is a question of phasing the other taxes out

Duh.