Comments by "wvu05" (@wvu05) on "Renters Get BIG WIN Over Landlords" video.

@billygibbs9866 Jacking up the bills every year out of sheer greed is the real evil.
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What exactly are you trying to get at with this word salad?
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@billygibbs9866 No one should be living in a car or a park bench, but if people can't afford housing, it certainly seems unfair to design park benches in such a way to make it impossible to sleep on.
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Not if you are in a rural area.
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@schumanhuman If you are in a poor rural area, an LVT would hurt people who happen to have land you really can't do anything with. After high school, my brother bought a trailer that also came with 29 acres of land. The land is on a hill away from the main road, and includes a cemetery and a lot of land that people can't use. Punishing someone for not developing land that can't be developed will hurt the poor, and all but the most ideologically inclined can see that.
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@schumanhuman If you tax "undeveloped land" at a higher rate, that is exactly how it works. Every single advocate argues that this is how it should work, and when I give an example of why it would be terrible for those who have land that can't be developed, you seem to misunderstand how life is in poor rural areas, and you think that they won't suffer compared to someone living in NYC. A lot of people live in those poor rural areas because they are cheap and all they can afford. You are taking that away because it is "undeveloped."
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@schumanhuman Well, then, how come so many of its advocates say it will "solve the problem of unused land," and I've heard a lot insist that this is how it will work? Oh, and if you're going based on the property value, we already have that, and [in Homer Simpson whisper] it is the most unpopular tax and a major cause for widening inequality.
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@schumanhuman "'and everyone, including non-landlords, pay property tax.' "No, they don't!" You seriously don't think that landlords pass the cost onto the consumer?
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@schumanhuman That's the theory, but as much as you can argue that landlords charge the most that they can, people still have to find a way if the cost gets passed on. And Adam Smith understood a great many things, but he didn't live in a world where public education was such a large factor in people's housing choices and that said public education was paid for with property taxes, which causes ever greater demand on high-rent properties.
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@schumanhuman But a lot of land can't be developed. That is the point that you are missing about poor rural areas. And there are other kinds of rural besides farmland, which you seem not to grasp, given that all of the examples you've used are based on farming.
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@schumanhuman If it's based on market value, how is that any different than property tax? That's literally what it does.
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@schumanhuman "neither did Ricardo's law of rents change when people favoured locations near to public schools" Then, why does rent keep spiraling in other places when property taxes go up? I've literally had landlords say that they were passing on the cost when evaluating the rental cost for the next year? Admittedly, I was moving anyway, because it was my senior year in college, but that was the stated reason.
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@schumanhuman Oh, in other places that I've rented that had no rent control and prices went up, they made no such niceties. One of them even presented it as "exciting news." Exciting for them, maybe. Now, if you want to argue that there is a limit to just how much it can be passed onto the tenant, so be it, but you're arguing that there is no relationship at all.
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@schumanhuman "eventually landlords have to come to a more realistic rent based on the fundamentals of supply and tenants ability to pay" And that day clearly isn't happening in a lot of places. As long as propertied interests continue to pass properties to each other like a game of hot potato to artificially raise prices and reduce home ownership (and I have seen this happen several times within a block of my own apartment , because no one is that unenthusiastic about their houses that multiple houses go back up for sale within a year), the demand for rentals will be artificially increased. There are quite a few tricks up their sleeves.
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@schumanhuman And if you think rent keeps going up because it's too low in places like San Francisco or Marin County (where the latter got so out of hand that they got rent control), then you and I clearly have a different definition of "undercharging."
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@schumanhuman "San Francisco is home to Silicon Valley, big wages and lots of wealth" There are plenty of people who live in San Francisco who don't have a lot of either. And that is the thing that these 18th and 19th century people you quote never anticipated: just how highly concentrated certain things are, which leave huge swaths of the country out entirely. The fact that Smith didn't see that the inevitable result of the invisible hand was extreme concentration of wealth shows his limits. The fact that George thought that so much of wealth was based on property when intellectual property has been worth so much more shows the limitations of trying to use land as the main basis for taxation.
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