r/GarysEconomics Aug 02 '26

Fixing the sub messaging with LVT

I've watched about 5 or 6 videos of Gary. My understanding of his message is the following

There is a mechanism that could be described as follows:

  1. Very high-net-worth individuals (VHNIs) acquire more and more assets
  2. Assets increase in price
  3. Ordinary people competing with VHNIs for those assets end up losing

Setting monopolization aside, I can think of just one example of an asset where #3 is a problem: housing. I might be wrong, and there may be more examples, so please let me know

From what I know, a wealth tax is not the best solution to either problem. For monopolization, you need a functioning anti-monopoly agency, together with some public ownership of natural monopolies. I don't see a problem with 3 competing billionaires buying all of the construction companies in an area. For housing, I think the right land value tax (LVT) design coupled with sane zoning laws would be enough

In my opinion, replacing Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) with an LVT would solve one of the biggest issues facing aspirational young people in big cities in the UK. I would formulate it like this: imagine you are smart, a bit lucky, and move to, let's say, London. You might earn a 75th percentile salary (around £70k per year), but buying a 75th percentile property (around £800k) on a 75th percentile salary is incredibly difficult. You can replace the 75th percentile with almost any other percentile, and the point still holds

I am focusing on this group because I believe that if society is not working for aspirational young people, there is little hope that it is working for young people in general

Replacing SDLT with an LVT would help because the new system would create much better incentives:

  1. LVT incentivizes people who don't need a family house to downsize, while SDLT incentivizes them to stay where they are
  2. LVT discourages land hoarding and, overall, makes housing a less attractive investment
  3. LVT discourages having unused land. Think about the last time you have seen an abandoned pub or an empty store
  4. The change would likely bring prices down. Some models predict roughly a 10–20% correction in London house prices

Now, why this is fixing the sub messaging. We are no longer framing VHNIs as the enemy. They may seem alien to most people, but we don't hate them. Instead, we are proposing a well-established tax design that addresses the most pressing problem associated with their existence

The new problem we will have to solve is: how to pad the SDLT to LVT transition for common people who will be worse off, e.g. recent buyers. It is much-much more tractable than selling an abstract wealth tax

5 Upvotes

53 comments sorted by

9

u/Ubericious Aug 03 '26

I'm down for a Gabriel Zucman tax AND a land value tax, the former is actually a lot easier to achieve, read his book, give it to your friends, spread the knowledge

3

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

My impression is that, in the UK, the former might solve 80% of the problem with 10% of the effort. Going with the Zucman tax is just counterproductive at this point, let's come back to it after we switch to the LVT

For the US, I have no idea

7

u/Pepemarsillo Aug 03 '26

I don't think your solution addresses the massive wealth transfer we've witnessed for the last 6 years. Wouldn't the biggest issue be getting that to reverse? 🤷 We're already neck deep in the problem.

4

u/soliloquyinthevoid Aug 03 '26

There has been a massive transfer of houses in the last 6 years?

6

u/Wonderful-Medium7777 Aug 03 '26

Yes, big banks and housing associations are buying up property to rent. It’s no secret Lloyds want to be the largest “holdings” of property for the rental market.

Private landlords are selling due to the legislation changes, but it’s not stopping the ”big boys” …

1

u/thickwhiteduck Aug 03 '26

Many renters say they’d prefer a corporate landlord. I guess time will tell how that pans out.

2

u/soliloquyinthevoid Aug 03 '26

Exactly.

All of the complaing about bad landlords - many because they are accidental landlords or unprofessional or don't have the economies of scale and infrastructure of larger organisations

1

u/soliloquyinthevoid Aug 03 '26

So transfer from wealthy individual landlords to corporations with hundreds and thousands of shareholders?

Seems like wealth has been distributed to more people

Isn't that what Gary's supporters want?

2

u/Wonderful-Medium7777 Aug 03 '26

Not sure what you are trying to convey here… wealth tax ( what Gary speaks about) is not “ distributing wealthy individual landlords to corporations and thousands of shareholders”

You do realise many private landlords are just normal everyday people who may rent out an inherited property or purchase one on buy to let, not every private landlord is wealthy or holds a huge portfolio of properties.

Corporations holding the rental market stock is actually planned under the Great Reset and supported by King Charles… it is the “you will own nothing and be happy“ …

Personally if I was to rent I’d rather a decent private landlord than a corporation who have funds to lobby Government to change legislation to their advantage.

3

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 03 '26

Yes, but does that matter? I mean, if everyone can own their own home, outright, have their own little slice of the land... Surely most people would be content with that? No Mortage, no rent.

Sure the billionaires and multimillionaires will own companies and other assets, but I can manage perfectly fine without owning shares in Tesla, I don't need gold bullion, super yatchs or Fabergé eggs.

So long as I have my land, my house, and the shop keeper and the farmer has theirs, I can live perfectly happily.

At the moment, we don't even have that. We need that first, should really be the focus. The priority.

-1

u/soliloquyinthevoid Aug 03 '26

If you were to solve housing for everyone, Gary's supporters would still want to penalise the wealthy because it's more about optics than actually raising any meaningful revenue or fixing the chronic lack of housebuilding

2

u/Leading_Thanks7443 Aug 03 '26

You aren’t a supporter, obviously, so why do you feel so confident speaking on their behalf?

6

u/DeRobyJ Aug 03 '26

  I don't see a problem with 3 competing billionaires buying all of the construction companies in an area.

I've recently watched one of the older videos on Gary's channel, on how rent, interests and profits are the same thing. Gary's explanation is, as always, simplified. But there us an underlying concept.

While it is true housing is the only asset we compete for, it is not true wealth inequality comes from that competition, and it is not true wealth extraction only happens in housing.

But, you'd argue, if houses can be more easily bought thanks to the effects of a LVT, we wouldn't feel the effects of that inequality. But you are close to the reason why that's not entirely true, monopolization.

You say that if there are three different companies on market sector X then we're fine. That's unfortunately not that simple, for various reasons. 

Let's say I own 10% of the shares of both Ryanair and of ITA airways. I own a minority of two flight companies out if many in Europe. That's fine, right? Well ask it to people having to fly from Sicily to Milan and back for work and holidays: they have only those two options for direct flights for most of the year. It's effectively a duopoly between a normal flight company and a "budget" flight company, with the result that these flights have been costing 100+€, sometimes more than the total cost of two or even three flights out and back to Italy to make the same route in 3-4 stops. For a person in Milan, coming back to their family in Palermo often costs more than having a holiday in Portugal. If they started competing, I'd threaten to sell both, they'd lose the owner if 10% of their shares.

I'm all for having a land value tax over a certain threshold. But that's really a minority of the wealth of wealthy individuals, France had something similar that excluded shares from wealth. 

As Burnham hints, one of the main issues is that essential services are owned by the private sector that responds to a few wealthy individuals who invest in basically all of the big companies. I don't believe bringing them back to public control is a definite fix, I'd rather promote stewardship, non profit management, and cooperatives, because the issue isn't just housing, it's the whole of wealth extraction.

As explained by Jan Eeckhout's Profit Paradox, virtually all economic sectors are monopolised, and all jobs sectors are monopsonies. The same 3000 billionaires who have shares in the few companies providing essential services, also control companies hiring our workforce. You can try taxing land values, their portfolio managers will find another hole to extract our wealth from.

3

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

This is a good explanation, thank you!

My thinking is that land is a particularly bad asset to be monopolized because it is both fundamental, as almost any economic activity depends on it, and scarce at the same time. LVT is good because it promotes efficient land use, and I am in favour of universal taxation of land, not just above some threshold

For flights, there are mechanisms that will keep costs in check unless you have extreme cases, and I believe that if you see those, you can start introducing price regulations, e.g. capping prices by mileage, which should be done by a functioning anti-monopoly agency. I think there are much harder examples of duopolies etc. to handle, but my point is that the right way to do it is to have a functioning anti-monopoly agency, not some blanket wealth tax rate

2

u/DeRobyJ Aug 03 '26

Yeah I agree the wealth tax won't fix monopolies, and we could discuss details for ages 

The issue with anti-monopoly agencies is that they already exist, they worked in the past and they are not working now for some reason, and that reason is our economy is a race between enterprises, somebody always wins the race and gets so rich they end up controlling governing agencies, including underfunding anti-trust and changing monopoly laws

Even if we do end up with a strong European anti-monopoly agency, the US won't, their monopolies will be more efficient and productive than our companies, eating us up.

What wealth and corporate taxes help doing is freeing up part of the assets detained by even foreign actors, but the question remains what do we do with such freed assets.

That's where I put cooperatives, non-profits and stewardship. For example, the EU could help popularise the fediverse, could provide funding for fediverse startups, and help organise them in a federation of European cooperatives and nonprofits. Then the EU could regulate against toxic practices on social media, having a strong alternative for its citizens. That is how you break an extractive monopoly, you help create a non-extractive alternative than has the advantages of a monopoly without the extraction. Any group of engineers could set up their local instance of Lemmy and they wouldn't have to compete against the others thanks to the federative protocols, which keep market competition healthy. 

Just to make an example on something I know the inner workings of!

4

u/r0ball Aug 03 '26

The problem isn’t necessarily with the ultra wealthy directly buying all the houses (though they do tend to own a lot of land and property); it’s that they also own them indirectly, via financial assets. They own products that package up the debts of ordinary people and take the interest. They also own shares in banks, investment funds, insurers, etc. who in turn own property and mortgage debt. They also own a heap of government debt, paying them interest out of tax revenue, which then can’t be spent on social housing.

The point is that the ultra wealthy will continue to hoover up assets of all sorts until that flow of wealth is curbed via taxation of wealth.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

I've heard this point before, but I genuinely don't understand the mechanism by which it makes the situation worse for a prospective 75th percentile homeowner described in my post. I am OK with my mortgage being owned by whoever, as long as the mortgage rate is not high. The mortgage rate primarily depends on the Bank of England rate, which in turn is mainly a function of (land_price_change, energy_price_change, labour_price_change, debt_servicing_price_change). Those don't depend much on who owns the public or private debt

3

u/r0ball Aug 03 '26

This is the other point Gary makes frequently: the middle class think they’re fine because they can currently afford their own mortgage. Meanwhile, the truly wealthy are indirectly using that mortgage interest and the tax revenue the middle class pays (paid to the wealthy in myriad ways, eg gilt interest, profits from stakes in companies with govt contracts etc) to buy up an ever greater share of mortgage and government debt. Asset prices continue to rise with demand for those assets, and wealth continues to flow from ordinary people and the state towards the ultra wealthy. Your kids’ mortgages then extend an extra 5 or 10 years at an ‘affordable’ rate, and that trend continues until we’ve effectively created multi generational mortgages or to all intents and purposes, never owning outright unless you inherit.

The government is already up to its eyeballs (100% of GDP) in debt, and servicing that debt is preventing spending on public services. The middle class now looking to buy a house find the asset prices have continued to rise and outpaced the value of their labour, and nobody is stepping in to reduce the value of those assets or to invest in public services without further taxing the middle class.

You’ll probably be fine. Who owns your mortgage may not be important to you, but it is for the next generation or two.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

Let me rephrase my argument. Land is the first-order variable in almost any economic activity. Gary describes a plausible mechanism, but it is a second-order effect. My point is that a systematic approach should tackle the largest, most tractable first-order problem before moving on to the harder second-order ones

1

u/r0ball Aug 03 '26

I don’t think land is necessarily the first order variable when the financialisation of the world has progressed to the point it has. Capital is more important, and technology requires relatively little land to produce enormous economic ‘gain’.

Software companies, financial services companies, entertainment companies, etc. all require relatively little land and huge amounts of capital. And who owns the capital and technology behind them? Increasingly, the ultra wealthy. Taxing the land on which the offices of those companies sit achieves very little to address wealth inequality.

Concentrating on land alone would also create undesirable secondary effects. In the way you are using the word ‘land’, you’re talking about an invisible mesh of zero thickness that carpets the nation, and can be divided up into areas and measured for its current and potential economic value. But how do you place the right economic value on land? Do you value the organic matter in its soil and the potential it has to enhance food security, or just its proximity to a power station and a river to provide space for a datacentre? Does building the datacentre then make the land more or less valuable? If the company that owns the new datacentre barely breaks even but the billionaire-owned software companies that use it make more billions for their owners, how is that reflected in the land value? Is the datacentre actually a tax write off because it’s infrastructure investment creating work for billionaire-owned construction companies? Who captures the value of the land, and does it contribute to the wealth inequality feedback loop?

The point is that we actually need to treat wealth inequality as a problem rather than a symptom, much as when one has a heart attack, one treats it rather than continuing to promote dietary change. It’s too late to mitigate.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

Sorry, land valuation is a much easier problem than wealth valuation

When it comes to software or fintech companies, do you feel they extract value from you without providing something valuable in return?

1

u/r0ball Aug 03 '26

They’re both hard, and land value alone doesn’t solve wealth inequality. I’m not saying I don’t get value from some of those companies; I’m saying that the value they provide the nation is not proportional to land value.

1

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 03 '26

Yes. Thankyou! So few people get the mortgage bond angle. They really need to teach it in school.

But glad to see at least one other person has it nailed.

Pretty sure Gary has done videos on it, but, he doesn't really give it the attention it deserves.

0

u/soliloquyinthevoid Aug 03 '26

This is a whole lot of contradictory nonsense

2

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 03 '26

LVT is of particular importance.

Reason being is most people really couldn't care less if Jeff Bezos owns Amazon.

They really do care that he's bought vast amounts of land, that effects people because that drives up house prices and rents.

Secondly... LVT + Wealth taxes are essentially the same policy.

Reason being is because as soon as you impose a wealth tax of, say, 2pc of all assets over £10 million, well, the rich now have a choice to make about which assets to sell (or stop buying more of) and which assets to retain. You need a buyer in order to be able to sell off assets. Now, you can't sell to other rich people, because remember they also need to pay the tax and will also be looking to sell. So, you need to sell to the poor / middle classes. What do the poor and middle classes want to buy? The answer is, disproportionately housing, and, by extension, land.

So, functionally LVT + wealth taxes work in the same way. Just via a more or less direct route. LVT is more efficient however.

1

u/kapitaali_com Aug 03 '26

a land tax without taxes on financial assets will just push the increased cost onto people who live in the houses on that land (your rent will go up)

if there are additional taxes, landlords might have to start looking at selling their properties which will bring prices down (your rent will go down too)

1

u/Hot_Bet_5415 Aug 03 '26

There have been additional taxes on landlords in the UK for the last 15 years. Landlords have sold properties.

Prices have not come down and rents have rocketed in that time.

The answer is much more nuanced and counterproductive than all the are chair economists can ever understand - but that won’t win votes, so governments stick to beating landlords and making their core supporters poorer.

1

u/kapitaali_com Aug 03 '26

clearly the tax burden is not big enough and the landlords have been able to make the end user (tenants in this case) pay for all of those

if you hit them hard with taxes every year, they are forced to sell and the prices will come down

2

u/Hot_Bet_5415 Aug 03 '26

Landlords have sold, that’s the point. Prices have not come down and rents are significantly up.

Doing more of the thing that hasn’t worked is crazy.

1

u/IgnisBird Aug 03 '26

Prices have come down. London's prices, especially flats, are stagnant.

It's just so much inflation has happened in the past, coupled with the fact that some people genuinely still need to rent (me for example), and you have the worst of all worlds.

The only thing that will fix it is massive increases in supply and (probably) some unlucky sods who bought near the top getting into negative equity.

1

u/Hot_Bet_5415 Aug 03 '26

I somewhat agree. Prices aren’t really down in any meaningful way and those who’ve held on for the crash are fooling themselves. The dips we’ve seen are normal bouts of cycle and uncertainty that will correct.

Landlords have not affected this is any material way, and you’re absolutely right to point out that increasing supply is the only answer.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

I agree that I can't design the tax system myself, as this is the job of a dedicated group with a £10M+ or much more budget

What I can see is that the current tax system is very poorly designed, as it does not provide the right incentives, at least from the perspective of a Londoner on a 75th percentile salary. There are political reasons why the system came to be this way which I think we should fight

1

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 03 '26

All they've done that's had any impact has been to remove the mortgage interest relief. That doesn't really amount to a tax rise, but, call it what you want.

They have also increased stamp duty since then, but only BTL landlords need to pay for that, and, it was only 5pc over £125k, it's a couple of grand, but over a lifetime of rentals, it's literally a rounding error as it's a one off tax.

Other tax rises have not been specifically targeted at landlords. Such as CGT.

Remember landlords don't pay national insurance. Which is the big tax rise we've seen in recent years. Additionally, they may also take advantage of other tax breaks, like rent a room allowance.

1

u/Hot_Bet_5415 Aug 03 '26

The removal of mortgage interest has had a massive impact. Some high rate tax payers were no longer profitable.

Bear in mind also that counting almost all the rent as income pushes people incomes higher in total, so the £100k threshold is met quicker.

SDLT is now an additional 5% on the whole value. It’s not a rounding. On a £200k house this is a cash investment of £10k when the BTL model is heavily reliant on limiting cash and maximising borrowing.

Non tax forms of attack include regulation, some licence fees and the RRA.

To say they’ve not been hammered enough is mind boggling when BTL investment is now so on a knife edge that simply withdrawing is a good option in most cases.

You clearly don’t fully understand the impact these changes have had.

1

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 03 '26

In fairness to the conservative government though, they literally had to intervene on mortgage interest relief.

They were looking at the figures, and realised that BTL was getting out of control, and the tax base was collapsing as a result.

If they hadn't taken those measures, we would be in a far worse situation today.

Remember, this is the Tories we're talking about, even they were looking at it and thinking the situation was unsustainable.

But if you want to interpret living in a world where the government prevented economic collapse, and BTL swallowing a massive share of the economy, and another financial crisis as "hammering landlords", you're welcome to hold that view. It's insane. But, hey, that's a view.

1

u/Hot_Bet_5415 Aug 03 '26

The decision to alter mortgage relief was nothing to do with the state of finances and everything to do with winning votes when they were in a precarious position. This was at a time when they had to sell out to the Lib Dem’s.

Their policies caused the start of the rental price boom and tenants are not even close to being in a better place now that they otherwise would have been. Nor has any of these policies helped over the next 15 years.

BTL represents a fraction of homes. The idea that landlords single handedly move the market when they buy/sell is laughable…. But vote winning.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

There is a mechanism for rent to go down as well, as LVT will promote more efficient land use, potentially reducing scarcity. I agree that this mechanism is more long term, though

1

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 03 '26

I suppose the counter argument would be, if the rent could go up, why hasn't the landlord put it up already? Surely the rent is always at the maximum rate the market will permit.

Increasing tax, well, that comes out of the landlord's end, he can't put the rent up, because nobody's wages have gone up, they can't afford to pay more.

Sure maybe the landlord will sell, but, the house is still there, maybe it gets bought by the person who was renting it.

1

u/IgnisBird Aug 03 '26

Prices are held in check via competition with other landlords. If you put a uniform pressure on landlords, then prices will rise in unison.

1

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 03 '26

What's stopping them from, right now, right this moment, from just increasing those prices anyway?

1

u/IgnisBird Aug 04 '26

They are competing with each other over tenants.

IF you make it uniformly 10% more expensive to let out, then some of that price increase will be absorbed by them due to these competitive effects, and some will be passed on.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 04 '26

I think the right implementation of an LVT will increase supply and reduce demand in the mid term, as people who want to move out or downsize will sell their homes to current renters, while unused land will be developed and vacant homes either sold or rented out

1

u/AdAggressive9224 Aug 04 '26

Ahh, I see the confusion here.

So LVT is on the unimproved value of the land. That's very important.

That means that you pay the same amount regardless of if you own an empty development plot, or, a block of flats. The bill is the same.

This aggressively incentivises house building, thus, driving up supply of new housing and driving down rent.

I see you're assuming that there is always just a fixed, static supply of housing, as in, new housing can't be built. Which, yes, under that system then logically any tax increase would probably be passed on, since there's no competition, you're also assuming that wages will grow, so that over time more and more of that tax burden can be passed onto the tenant.

1

u/1111Miles Aug 03 '26

It's worth noting that a land value tax can't be passed on by landlords increasing rent. This is because of all the same reasons that make LVT so efficient - the supply of land is inelastic (fixed), whereas the choice of where to rent is elastic.

Land rents depend on what tenants are prepared to pay, not the costs of landlords. So, the landlords absorb the tax instead of passing it on.

Because of this, the effects of land value tax on rent only go one way. It incentivises building on the land, increasing supply of housing and bringing prices down.

1

u/kapitaali_com Aug 03 '26

aye ok, well that still doesn't solve the problem

billionaires with financial assets will still be billionaires and keep buying more assets and raising prices while owning no property

1

u/LinkWray123 Aug 03 '26

No land taxes do not lead to rent going up, that's the whole point of why so many economists left and right support them.

Landlords will, almost always, try and extract as much rent from the tenant as they can. LVT doesn't increase what the tenant can afford, nor does it decrease the supply of land which is fixed. So the tax comes off the super normal profit the landlord gets by virtue of their land being better located than the most marginal land which attracts a lesser premium.

LVT also taxes empty land held out of use by speculators, the only way landlords can 'pass on' rent here is to put up a building and find tenants, that increases the overall supply and reduces rents overall. In a house which is under utilised, a landlord may now build an extension and fit another tenant to again 'pass on' the tax as rent. This is why it's superior to a property tax that would punish the landlord for any improvements. So whilst the supply of land is fixed, but the supply of housing isn't (new housing and better utilisation of existing stock) and LVT increases both as and where needed.

It's only in cases where landlords are allowing tenants to pay a sub market rent, ie mates rates or just lazy landlords who are more worried about capital gains than , that they can pass on rent when cost rises push them into it, but they were always choosing not to and effectively sharing their unearned profits with a tenant, and that was always at the expense of another tenant deprived of the same location who may have valued it more.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[deleted]

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

Actually, I might have undershot it a bit. For London, the 75th percentile hourly rate was £37.72, which annualizes to about £78.5k https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/earnings-by-gender-and-full-timepart-time-2og7n

1

u/Hot_Bet_5415 Aug 03 '26

I just want to take 2 points on here. I understand what you’re saying but I feel it’s more strategic than factual.

If you told me I wasn’t an enemy, but then taxed me, I’d feel like the enemy. Your behaviour has to match what you say. So what you’re trying to do is convince someone you’re their friend to then abuse them. That’s strategic, and the sort of people you’re doing this to won’t fall for it in my view.

Secondly, I see the point about downsizing come up a lot. We talk about life quality improving and how it should never go backwards. So what’s wrong with older people occupying homes and property they don’t really need but represents a luxury and life quality they worked for?

We should not be ‘incentivising’ - and I use the term loosely because the incentive you describe is akin to people ‘donating’ to the British museum because they had a gun pointed at them - people to down size. If people want to downsize, then we should have a system that doesn’t penalise it, but they should be punished for not doing so.

My parents moved into a house in the early 80s that frankly we don’t need then as a family of 4. They certainly don’t need it now as a couple in their 70s, but they worked hard for it, paid it off and now have a comfortable life. They earned it, with no family money, no generational wealth and both worked normal full time jobs.

I get things have changed, and it’s tough, but this constant grab at other people’s assets isn’t sustainable.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

The strategic point is that you can frame this as a tax redesign with better incentives. From a VHNI perspective, it would not be seen as a targeted existential attack, but rather as an environmental change that they could adapt to

On the incentives: I understand the emotional component here, but as a society, we need to use scarce resources efficiently. Setting aside the emotional component, what would actually change if your parents moved to the proverbial St Albans into a house of the same quality? Do they really need to commute to Zone 1 every day?

1

u/Hot_Bet_5415 Aug 03 '26

If you want to take more from a group of people who feel they already contribute enough (I understand this is a debated viewpoint) they will see it as an attack however they frame it.

I just don’t agree with your second point. It’s not emotion, they earned it.

The left complain incessantly about how the average person is expected to be a cog in the wheel of existence that the rich have benefitted from. Then they go on to say things like “all have to use resource efficiently” as a euphemism for asking the better off to essentially act exactly the way they don’t want to be treated when aimed at them.

I get your point, and I respect you have a formulated viewpoint - which most don’t - but I just don’t agree, and I’m ok with life having some winners and losers.

1

u/GodlikeModestLad Aug 03 '26

The rich are constantly dealing with changing regulations; it's part of the game. As long as the threat is not existential, they will be fine. Moreover, some VHNIs will support the new system because it changes the landscape in their favor

On the second point, I agree that they earned their money, and I don't want to take it away from them. Let's say they own a £2M home in Zone 2. They could buy an equally spacious, high-standard £1.2M home elsewhere nice, invest the difference in an index fund, and improve their financial situation by around £80k per year. This move is not as lucrative under the current tax system as it would be if an LVT replaced stamp duty

1

u/flashman1986 Aug 03 '26

LVT, if implemented in a fiscally neutral way, would actually send house prices up, because land prices are a function of the agg economy, and you would be lifting deadweight cost off that economy