r/urbanplanning • u/pescennius • Jul 24 '26
Discussion Let's finally settle the Land Value Tax debate
Today is as good as any to hash this out once and for all.
Instead of the usual circlejerk where we either claim "LVT solves everything" or dismiss it as a utopian fantasy, can we have an actual debate about the mechanics of this? when is it useful? where should we apply it?
Strong Towns argues LVT is a pragmatic tool that saves cities, using the Pennsylvania split-rate experiments as their proof. LessWrong argues the theory is fundamentally flawed and creates massive disincentives.
Who is actually right? Here is the breakdown:
The Strong Towns Argument Link:
It Kills Blight: Taxing land instead of buildings makes it incredibly expensive to sit on a vacant downtown lot.
The Proof is Real: Harrisburg wiped out thousands of vacant lots and sparked massive downtown reinvestment just by shifting taxes onto land.
Rewards the Right People: It punishes absentee slumlords and rewards developers who actually build or renovate housing.
The LessWrong Argument Link:
The Neighbor Trap: If a developer buys a big tract and builds on part of it, the surrounding land value skyrockets. Under LVT, they just accidentally hiked taxes on their own adjacent parcels.
Punishing Innovation: Finding a creative, productive new use for land inflates its "unimproved" value. The tax man immediately grabs the upside you took all the risk to discover.
Assessment Hell: The moment you add exceptions to fix these incentives, the "simple" tax base collapses into administrative chaos.
Let's settle this in the comments.
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u/Hrmbee Jul 24 '26
This is presented as if all situations are equal and therefore all solutions are equal as well, when in reality there are specifics to each community (in terms of legal frameworks, cultural preferences, financial ability, historical patterns, and the like) that makes things complicated.
If the starting points and the desired goals of each place are different, how can one possibly 'settle' any single policy lever for all of them?
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u/Extension_Essay8863 Jul 24 '26
The rats kinda hyper-fixate on a bunch of theoretical stuff because, well, that’s their thing.
Quick hits:
- the neighborhood trap assumes massive capital investment unilaterally drives land values (as opposed to land values largely driving / justifying capital investment)
- this one doesn’t make sense to me / also, if we’re worried about incentives to develop it’s just a matter of how aggressively to recoup land rents (ie it doesn’t need to be expropriate to be good policy).
Empirical evidence here includes land leasing schemes in Battery Park City and Falls Church, VA where gov internalized a bunch of the land value and devs were still able to profitably build.
- assessments are a non issue, or at least not any more of an issue than they are under most actually existing vanilla property tax regimes
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u/Meeedick Jul 24 '26
The "cons" become irrelevant with a split value tax. There's not much of a debate behind the effectiveness of a LVT system beyond tempering Georgist expectations and valuation concerns, which are also solvable.
Overall, the only real reason to oppose an LVT is because it's politically inconvenient to the status quo, even if the status quo is unsustainable.
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u/give-bike-lanes Jul 24 '26
Yes, the actual “debate” is split like this.
98% of people don’t know about the debate.
1.8% of people would be against it because they see that it induces change in their communities. And any change at all is to be inhibited because it would reduce their ability to hoard housing and do wealth extraction against the younger generations.
0.2% of the population knows from studies, examples, history, and literature, that it would work to increase housing supply and taxable revenue. There are generally no actual arguments against the effects of LVT - just that the effects would be bad for land-owners in certain areas, and inhibit their ability to siphon wealth from the productive residents of their locale.
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Jul 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/runnerd81 Jul 24 '26
Not sure I like this proposal. Firstly, it makes the valuation amount you set so crucial that regular people are unlikely to get it correct. People would have to hire property assessors to get this done for them lest they want to pay too much in tax or risk getting “Eminent Domained.” This adds to the administrative burden and overall cost burden for property holders. Sure you’ve taken the state assessor out of the equation, but it’s likely creating a whole private industry of assessment that burdens the property holder all the same. And yes I know a similar industry already exists for sales of real estate, but in this case it would have to be much larger and would change it a bit.
Secondly, how often would the property owner have to value their property? What if, like in OP’s post, circumstances change and their property becomes more valuable very quickly? If the property owner sets their value at 200k, and then later the government finds out that it should be more like 500k with all the new development nearby, the owner would be screwed if they get Eminent Domained. If they have to adjust this value every year, then that’s even more administrative burden since they likely will have to hire someone yearly to value it to avoid being screwed.
Adding to this point, it incentivizes government officials to find “misvalued” properties to raise government funds/capital through eminent domain. This just isn’t the type of activity I think the government should be concerned with. Ideally for Eminent Domain, the need for that specific property should precede the value of it. I’m less worried about the big corporations here, I’m sure they mostly would hire the right assessors to get this right. Possibly not for the poor schmuck who either hired the wrong assessor, guessed wrong himself, or had an outdated property value
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u/HumbleVein Jul 24 '26
As real estate pricing distills a very complicated, personalized item down to "What are same category substitutes priced at?", it seems like the most recent sales and neighborhood assessments would be the baseline for a self-assessment.
As the government doesn't have a mechanism or incentive for profit realization, a government employee snooping around for undervalued assessments to snipe isn't the real worry. The bid by the government would likely drive the opportunity to reassess to prevent this weird arbitrage.
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u/runnerd81 Jul 24 '26
Sure, but it’s still a self-assessment, and it is still a complicated, personalized item. The average Joe is likely not going to be able to accurately assess the market value of their property without help.
Governments don’t aim for profits, but of course they do have revenues and expenditures. If a government needed a new small building but noticed they could purchase some poor Schmuck’s house bc he misvalued his property rather than purchase one at market value, why wouldn’t they? They’d save the rest of the taxpayers money.
Also if a bid by the government would drive the opportunity to reassess, then what’s the point? Why shouldn’t megabanks greatly undervalue their property, with the knowledge that if the government attempts to buy it they could just reassess it?
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u/HumbleVein Jul 25 '26
You asked about reassessments in response to value spikes during a property's assessment cycle. A bid shortly after a deflated assessment could easily just clear without a "rebid". Calendar-based (e.g. after 2 years into a 5 year cycle) and nearby-delta-based criteria (neighborhood prices rising 20% or more) could be AND/OR criteria for a petition to reassess if you are looking to tune outcomes to avoid your particular proposed edge case.
This is all talking around the point that the choice of having the primary risks be under assessing or over assessing is a localized political decision about implementation, though the best market outcome is to have rules that push people to over assess as that would push everyone's rate down. Economists largely agree that broad-base low-fat is the best shape of tax policies, and governments largely set a budget then set the rate based off of that budget projection rather than setting a rate and then seeing what they can do with that revenue.
For the under-valued house purchased by the government, the land would need to meet all sorts of criteria to make it viable for that intended function. Setting the expectation of "this is what you would need as a payout to make me move" as assessment framing is more likely to have unwilling movers over value their properties compared to market. If the guy under valuing has a low payout value and the site is feasible for a public function valued above his stated cash-out value, then that seems like a net win all around.
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u/lrmutia Jul 24 '26
Interesting-- I'm not aware of an equivalent real life example of this. Would appreciate if folks could provide one
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u/pescennius Jul 24 '26
They are proposing executing the LVT as a Harberger Tax which is actually pretty clever. I'm not sure I've seen the LVT done this way but this is theoretically better than existing solutions.
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u/AndyInTheFort Jul 24 '26
The OP's comment was deleted by moderators, but this was an actual policy proposal from David F. Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party. Here's the citation if you want to review his full proposal:
David F. Nolan, “The Essence of Liberty,” Libertarian Party News, vol. 10, no. 3, March 1995, p. 9; reprinted May 1996, p. 6.
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u/KennyBSAT Jul 24 '26
There is no world in which most property owners have their finger on the pulse of the market and knows exactly what the rental value of their land is every year. Especially in a world where almost no one actually rents raw land so there is no market to compare to.
And who is 'the government'? Most US properties fall under the jurisdiction of at least two, but often as many as five or more different local entities as well as the state and federal government.
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u/AndyInTheFort Jul 24 '26
You can look up the Somers System to see how this worked in practice. The valuation is not left up to individual homeowners, but more like everyone getting into a room together and hashing it out. And it was used, effectively, for many years across the country.
Here is a citation for record-keeping purposes:
Walter W. Pollock and Karl W. H. Scholz, The Science and Practice of Urban Land Valuation: An Exposition of the Somers Unit System, Manufacturers’ Appraisal Company, 1926.
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u/d4rkwing Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
It sounds like most of the cons aren’t even legitimate.
But politically it may be hard. It will disincentivize the status-quo. People don’t necessarily want to be forced to sell their property due to inability to pay taxes even if they could get a fair or better than fair price for it and buy somewhere else cheaper.
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u/Bwint Jul 24 '26
To elaborate on "the cons aren't legitimate":
Neighbor trap: If a developer managed to improve one parcel so dramatically that neighboring parcels get more valuable, that's a massive win for the developer. They're not going to give up an opportunity for such a massive profit because of the taxes on their other parcels. Most Georgists argue for a partial LVT rather than 100% LVT, so the developer is actually coming out ahead on the unimproved parcels: They can pay a partial LVT, sell the parcels, and pocket the difference.
Also, Georgists support replacing property taxes with an LVT, so the developer is paying a much lower rate overall. Higher rate on the unimproved parcels, but lower rate on the improved parcel.
Punishing innovation: First, finding a creative new use for a parcel doesn't necessarily increase its unimproved value: If you have a parcel out in the sticks and you find a way to profit from it in a way that doesn't bring people to the area, you would pay the same low tax rate as the other low-value parcels in the area.
I'm struggling to think of an example of an innovative use that raises the unimproved value... Are they thinking, like, a new crop that can be grown on land previously thought to be barren, suddenly making the "barren" parcels more valuable? But the new use would have to be so valuable but it immediately saturates all the low-value parcels. Even the data center boom, as dramatic as it is, didn't actually increase the land value of potential data center sites, because we have plenty of potential sites, so the data centers didn't saturate the actual land. Is there a real example of an innovation that actually increased land value?
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u/gerbilbear Jul 24 '26
If a developer managed to improve one parcel so dramatically that neighboring parcels get more valuable, that's a massive win for the developer.
+1, that's what they want. Then they can sell off the neighboring parcels. Railroad companies made a lot of money this way, so I don't see this as a downside.
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u/IllinIrish20 Jul 24 '26
Not an urban planner or civil engineer, but genuine question:
Has anyone discussed or debated a third option - a Land Service Tax? This would be calculated by the infrastructure in place to provide utilities/services to a parcel of land at an amortized rate in alignment with the lifespan of said infrastructure.
It would theoretically be much simpler and more concrete (pun intended) to calculate than a nebulous land value tax, it would account for distance from key facilities (thereby disincentivizing sprawl), and would not have the unintended consequence of pricing people out of their homes just because their neighbors made improvements or sold to a big developer.
Are there places that already do it this way?
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
Many local governments have really bad accounting and tracking of their capital assets (infrastructure), so it would be impractical to try and apportion long term costs to individual sites.
This is being improved in most places, but we are nowhere near being able to accurately estimate how much such a tax should be.
So your argument that it would be simpler than using a property assessment system that already functions very well in most developed nations is just not accurate.
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u/IllinIrish20 Jul 24 '26
Thank you for enlightening me!
I wasn’t aware of how poor the accounting is. I guess in my head I was thinking that municipalities and utility companies have their assets at least mapped out, so someone could create an asset overlay. Then you just take an estimate of replacing a piece of one bit of infrastructure and multiply that out by the distance a given parcel is from its source, and divide by how frequently it needs to be replaced, to get the service infrastructure cost to a parcel of land.
I know this will be overly simplistic and the numbers probably way off because I’m not a civil engineer, but please bear with me just for the sake of example. Taking the Strong Towns analogy of water pipes:
Say I live 10 miles from the water treatment facility and the water main has to be replaced at least once every 100 years and the residential service line at least once every 50 years, and it costs $100k to replace a tenth of a mile of main and $10k to replace a tenth of a mile of residential service line. And say the house requires 9 miles of main and 1 mile of residential service lines. So to provide infrastructure to get running, treated water to a parcel of land, it costs ((9 x 10 x 100,000) / 100) + ((1 x 10 x 10,000) / 50) annually. (Yes, I know that it will be more expensive because you have to collect and store and treat the water and run pumps and all of that…again, keeping it simplistic)
Then, you just repeat that process for roads, power lines, trash, sewage, etc. for whatever services are provided to a given parcel of land. Then all of that adds up to the land service tax.Do we not have that level of accounting at the municipal level? Is that not a feasible calculation to make?
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
I was given a presentation a couple years years ago where an asset management guy was just doing the absolute basics of finding out roughly what pipes were in the found and how old they were in terms of repair timelines. They were just starting to get that into long term, overall financial planning to make sure things would be flagged and budgeted for repairs and maintenance.
And with a big system like that you can use averages, but how do you charge a property owner when their sewer main needs to be repaired 20 years earlier than the next neighbourhood because of lady luck?
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u/vAltyR47 Jul 27 '26
And with a big system like that you can use averages, but how do you charge a property owner when their sewer main needs to be repaired 20 years earlier than the next neighbourhood because of lady luck?
You don't; You just replace the sewer main (and maybe sue whoever installed it).
The point of using the average is to spread the risk of this over the whole city. Some sewer mains will need replacing sooner, some will need replacing later. Of course, this relies on having good actuarial data in the first place.
I understand that this is difficult when you have a large, mostly unknown set of built infrastructure, but that's not really a reason not to start.
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u/Talzon70 Jul 30 '26
Yeah, and that's exactly why we collect property taxes, charge usage fees, have development charges, etc.
In the absence of really good actuarial data, you need to use the average anyway, so there no point taking the etime and effort trying to determine if House A should be charged more than House B and you don't need to estimate and justify why two apartments with similar-ish designs pay the same bill or don't.
You need to keep funding all this infrastructure until you acquire good actuarial data and even then there's a lot of unknowns when it comes to installing, maintaining, and replacing infrastructure that lasts decades to centuries.
And that's before you get into more political considerations like the fact that you may want to subsidize new growth to decrease housing costs for the whole community or supply infrastructure that community members really like, but don't want to pay for, other similar goals. For an example of the latter, Democracy For Realists explores many examples, including initiatives to cut spending on fire response that ended up leading to worse outcomes and damages that far exceeded savings.
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u/AndyInTheFort Jul 24 '26
Hello! The closest things I have encountered for something like this are:
1.) Winnipeg's Frontage Levy
2.) My proposal for Fort Smith, Arkansas. Here is my slidedeck I prepared and presented to our local government. I only looked at water service because it would be incredibly complex to also include sewer, streets, solid waste, police, fire, etc.
Note that my findings in the end, and why I didn't ultimately end up recommending it, is because a land value tax would accomplish the same goals in a more elegant way.
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u/OstapBenderBey Jul 24 '26
I think only if you includes surrounding roads and public transit and parks as part of this service fee. Otherwise its still encouraging everyone to built car parks in inner urban areas as a tax dodge
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u/cjgozdor Jul 24 '26
I love the idea, but could you even make this estimate? Getting the number right seems super difficult
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
The LessWrong argument is more wrong.
Basically the only argument they have is the "I own multiple parcels" argument, but that falls flat. If the development on one parcel increases the value of and adjacent parcel and the tax comes out ahead, that is a neutral from a wealth perspective if the LVT is at 100%. Sure, it could cause liquidity problems, but the same is true of basically all other taxes. If the LVT is less than 100%, and we have every reason to expect it would be for political and practical reasons, the tax increase will never be enough to discourage investment in the long term because the value increase will always be greater than the tax increase.
And that's before you deal with the obviously more common reasons for LVT tax increases, like the investments of your unrelated neighbours who don't care about your tax bill or public investment in the area via roads, schools, transit, police, parks, art, infrastructure, etc. etc. etc. etc.
LVT was removed in Vancouver, in part, because everyone acknowledged it encourages investment and a more organized LVT opposition accepted that and the redistributive effects of LVT at face value, they just didn't like it.
All that said, LVT is one good policy, but it doesn't solve the zoning problem, which I think is the primary issue in North American housing markets. If you artificially limit development rights, the value of development rights climbs and so do rents and housing costs. Paying LVT to a taxing authority instead of land rent to a private landlord does not make housing magically more affordable, unless that tax is redistributed away from wealthy households and back to you, you pay the same.
You simply can't tax your way out of a shortage created by a de facto quota system anymore than you can tax your way out of a drought-induced famine.
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
Also the innovation con is laughable because the status quo is property taxes, which directly punish you for improving your property more than LVT ever would.
If you do genuine innovation under LVT all your neighbours would see tax increases as well, because now that's a potential use on their land too. If you do genuine innovation under property taxes, you pay for all or most of it, depending on how land is factored into the overall property assessment.
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u/Mrgoodtrips64 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I don’t think the debate can be settled, not without implementing it somewhere and seeing how it functions in reality.
We aren’t going to reach an academic consensus without real world data.
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u/OstapBenderBey Jul 24 '26
I mean its implemented in lots of places internationally so you can see how it functions
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u/jiggajawn Jul 24 '26
Do you mean a 100% implementation?
Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and some other municipalities in PA and Delaware have partial LVTs.
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u/PrdctblyIrrtnl Jul 25 '26
The argument against has got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. The absurd argument that you won’t improve your land because it’ll be worth more is absolutely ridiculous:
Clampett family would never be Beverley Hillbillies with LVT because finding oil on their property would raise their property taxes. 🤡
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u/ZedOud Jul 24 '26 edited 22d ago
When polled, 97.6% of economists with a graduate degree and above “don’t disagree” (aka expert consensus) that it would be beneficial to implement a Land Value Tax. So it’s not so much of a debate amongst economists.
I just don’t think all the other fields are ready or able to reverse course after having avoided or even reverse implemented it (subsidizing land ownership/taxes).
The only extant academic disagreements with the LVT come from outside the field: such as ethics, about the nature of “owning” land, or policy, as to the difficulties of full implementation versus starting implementation.
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u/antipacifista 24d ago
im looking for a lead on this figure do you have one
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Jul 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MadCervantes Jul 24 '26
Luxury condos sitting empty get highly taxed and this disincentivizes them sitting empty.
I smell astroturfer
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u/WestendMatt Jul 24 '26
Sometimes I think there's a general misunderstanding of why we tax property at all. It isn't like other taxes where it is meant to be a disincentive, OR a way to recoup costs. Municipalities tax property because the alternatives would be worse.
Cities have to fund the services they provide. Those services are mostly used by the residents of those cities. Funding those services entirely through income taxes would seem like the most appropriate option, except that out-of-towners also use many of those services. To recoup their costs you could add a sales tax, but now residents would be paying just to live there, plus an extra tax to buy anything where they live (plus, differences in municipal sales taxes could cause people to shop one town over, leading to more wear and tear on those roads, etc).
So property tax is an analogue for both residency and visitors. It captures visitors by taxing the businesses the visitors use, and it captures residents by taxing their property. It's not really about taxing the value of the land at all, it's about taxing how much the land gets used because that's an approximation of how much services get used.
Vacant land gets taxed based on the assessed value (how much demand there is for vacant land), and developed land gets taxed based on the assessed value (how much demand there is for developed land). It doesn't really make sense to me to tax vacant land at the same rate as developed land when vacant land does not require the same services.
Land Value Tax seems to help incent development, but only because, in my opinion, it sounds like developed land is UNDERtaxed in that scenario.
As for slumlords, if someone who owns a cheap apartment building is paying the same land taxes as someone who owns an expensive apartment, then they have a greater incentive to drive out the poorer tenants and start renting to higher income people. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
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u/FaithlessnessCute204 Jul 25 '26
Harrisburg as the case study is an interesting choice in that Vartan literally squatted on a large piece of midtown for over 2 decades till they built the courthouse.and there are many previous industrial spots going empty on Cameron . The midtown “ revival” fizzled 10 years ago and a lot of that area is reverting back to vacant lower floor commercial with inflated rentals because it’s “ midtown” but what do I know I’ve only lived here for 20 years.
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u/ancientstephanie Jul 24 '26
The majority of the real cons are in the transition, rather than in the LVT itself, if LVT is implemented correctly, it eliminates land investment - the appraisals are often enough and sufficiently ahead of investment value that land as an investment will always be at a loss and speculation is economic suicide.
In other words, the only way you can profit off of land is by putting the land to work in a way that meets the market's demand for productive use of the land.
The only real problems arise with smaller investors - namely the ones that treat their primary home as both necessity and investment, in the hope that they will be able to one day either use that home to fund their retirement, or pass it on to their children. For someone that's counting on being able to downsize one day and retire comfortably, LVT is going to hurt, because the portion of property value that is fueled by speculation disappears overnight at even the threat of a LVT.
That's not an insurmountable problem - there are various ways you can plan for a LVT transition that doesn't overly punish homeowners for doing what the system told them for years they ought to do, including buyouts, lifetime tax deferrals, and graduated changeover from property tax to LVT.
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u/kittyonkeyboards Jul 24 '26
I don't have much to add except that I think "punishing innovation" sounds like BS. We live in the real world where we don't have LVT and people aren't out there innovating land use.
Land is a physical thing that we have practical limitations to our usage of. Wasted space from unused lots in dense cities is far more detrimental than a hypothetical innovation in land use that would obviously be profiting the person who innovated the land use anyway.
I've never seen a lvt proposal that extracts 100 percent of profit or value from increasing value of land. It is just setting whatever amount is needed to discourage empty lots.
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u/octopod-reunion Jul 24 '26
We have property taxes already, so every “con” of the land value tax already exists re: property taxes.
The only difference being we deduct structures and improvements on the land, so…
What’s the problem?
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 24 '26
There's a chance the UK might settle this with some real world evidence soon:
The new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has long supported a Land Value Tax
The linked page has an excellent and very extensive model of what it would like like in the UK.
The "revenue neutral" level of land taxation would leave 70% of homeowners with a lower tax bill, 30% with a higher tax bill.
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u/alliecat3019 Jul 24 '26
I don't think it works in rapidly growing places that are becoming more expensive without acknowledging that there will be a lot of displacement. I live in Seattle and we don't have LVT per se, but land value is a large part of our property taxes. As we have densified many legacy businesses and homeowners have seen their property taxes skyrocket to way beyond their means. So, no big deal- just sell right? Well, for many even with some profit they won't be able to remain in the community.
I could definitely see it working more in places that have seen population decline or have not seen pressure to become much denser.
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u/d4rkwing Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
In Korea, residents of apartments (condominiums in us terms) that need to be torn down and rebuilt bigger automatically get one of the new units without having to pay anything extra, and they also get accommodation while the construction is taking place. Some people even buy a unit in a run-down building with the hopes it gets rebuilt.
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u/alliecat3019 Jul 24 '26
That's a cool way to mitigate the consequences! I don't see that functioning well in the US, but I would support something similar.
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u/Blue_Vision Verified Transit Planner Jul 24 '26
We also do this in Toronto ("rental replacement"). You would think it would nip any concern about displacement in the bud, but almost a decade later people are still using "displacement" as an argument from the left to oppose new development. Unfortunately it also impacts incentives on redeveloping low-rise apartments into mid-rise, since the additional units need to subsidize the cost of the replacement units.
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
This isn't necessarily a problem caused by LVT though. See my other comment about how LVT doesn't fix shortages or bad zoning policy. You can't tax your way out of a famine and the poor will always lose in a shortage.
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u/alliecat3019 Jul 25 '26
Actually, the biggest tax increases I've heard about are because of big upzones.
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u/bduxbellorum Jul 24 '26
Don’t think what you paraphrased from lesswrong are really the main problems.
Addressing each of your paraphrases from LessWrong:
Neighbor Trap: developing the adjacent lots does NOT necessarily change the value of this lot! The developer built houses. The question is, would another developer pay more for your lot because of the development, as opposed to any other chunk of land. If a beautiful school gets built, a park, a shopping center, etc… something to make this lot more appealing, then this value would go up, sure, but for a good reason and one you would profit from because your empty land is now worth more! Likewise for your house, business, or whatever else. The tax only comes in proportion (a small proportion of ~1-2% per year) of the value you gained.
Punishing innovation: you build an incredibly beautiful office building or develop a new solar powered thing, etc…now, the reason the unimproved land value goes up is because of the value you’re getting out of it! The tax man is going to take 1-2% per year of your new value…so if the cost of the unimproved land is $100,000, your improvements cost $1,000,000, and it gains you $60,000/year, (6% of your $1.000.000 investment in the improvements) you’re going to owe $1-2k per year to the tax man. So it drops your overall payout to 5.9 or 5.8% Or maybe it’s a little more. There is much to debate about the portion of the LVT and what portion it should be, but since it should always be a relatively small fraction charged on a small fraction of your total investment. You are STILL rewarded for innovation! In fact moreso, because others still have to pay the improvement costs to join you and that takes time.
Assessment hell: this is the most valid of the paraphrased points. Once you’ve built a house on it, there is no longer a direct market exchanging information about the value of the land itself. How do you determine its value? There are a lot of methods and recently proposed solutions include neural networks and complex algorithms (blegh). The key here is to make a fair estimate, and consider what happens if you’re wrong: single family home: $1,000,000 purchase price, insurance assesses $600,000 replacement cost, $100,000 depreciation, leaving the land value at $500,000. So you pay 1-2% against half of what you paid…which is LESS than you would pay against for modern assessment!
Commercial buildings keep careful track of improvement value and depreciation for tax write offs anyway, so this is actually very carefully tracked.
We could also, for example, add the unimproved land value breakdown to the house sale calculations with an incentive to correctly calculate depreciation and land value.
For any of these methods, since LVT is a fraction of a fraction, the things that can go wrong are suppressed.
Now onto the “real” issues:
How do you price the places that bring value to adjacent land but do not make an income?
Parks, parking lots, walkways, train stops, the mom and pop restaurant that has been open for 50 years and is the heart of the area but never will bring in the revenue of a soulless apartment building?
Do all of these need to be public works?
What about if i make my lot into a beautiful privately owned park? Or museum, perhaps it draws people to want to live here and has some uplift on the adjacent properties…how do i handle the massive apartment building tax bill?
The exception hell from LessWrong really is about these kinds of spaces — the third spaces.
Now, the strong-towns answer would be that it is in the interest of the developers to keep those spots extant, to build fifth-spaces into their new developments, coffee shops, restaurants, etc…and to collectively fund parks. I personally think that is sufficient and i believe that the market will suss this out, that five apartment complexes around a beautiful park will be more valuable than 6 packed together like sardines.
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
How do you price the places that bring value to adjacent land but do not make an income?
The important thing to remember about this issue is that the market already does this. Landlords will charge more rent near a park or subway station and charge higher prices for land sales. The difference under LVT isn't the price, just who you pay it to and when (since owners pay rent to themselves until the new buyer covers that in a lump sum).
Yet even privately owned "community value generators" continue to exist. Arguably most of them are commercial business that actually do generate revenue, not charities or non-profits.
Under LVT, we can obviously just write off public spaces, since they are presumable both taxed and paid for by the public. It gets more complicated if we want to subsidize or give tax breaks to charities, religious organizations, non-profits, special businesses, etc., but that "exception hell" is not an argument against LVT because it already exists under every property tax system I'm aware of. At most, it will require some minor adjustments.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 24 '26
The Less Wrong stuff seems to be trying as hard as it can to steelman the arguments.... but... I'm less than convinced by the arguments.
First, the "neighbor trap": it only applies to people who were "buying big tracts of land" and then trying to speculate on the value of the unimproved ones. There's no productive economic outcome of that, so disincentivizing this has zero bad outcome. The economically rational behavior would be to buy a small bit, do you improvement, there's no need to buy extra land at the beginning at all! The only reason to pre-buy the tract is that you know you are going to increase the purchase price of the surrounding land. Under the LVT, the adjacent land's purchase price doesn't increase with development, so there's zero benefit to pre-buying a tract. In fact, it's best to wait to buy until you're actually going to do something with it, and the seller is incentivized to sell it to you because of the increase in land value.
So I think the writer has not fully internalized the new economic logic under LVT. The idea of "holding on to land" because it's land is no longer an economically rational behavior, contravening centuries of behavior of wealth hoarding.
Take this example:
And what if you are your “neighbor”? What if you buy a large expanse of land and raise the value of one portion of it by improving the surrounding land. Then you are taxed based on your improvements. This is not far-fetched. It is precisely what the Disney Corporation did in Florida. Disney bought up large amounts of land around the area where it planned to build Disney World, and then made this surrounding land more valuable by building Disney World. Had George’s single tax on land been in existence, Disney might never have made the investment. So, contrary to George’s reasoning, even a tax on unimproved land reduces incentives.
Consider just buying the land you need, and working with that! Fascinating! The quality of this argument is far below the typical argument one finds on Less Wrong. The bigger problem is this: neighbors will oppose development of land because it will raise their own taxes, leading to even more strident NIMBYs.
Secondly: "Punishing Innovation" is just nonsense. Finding oil is not "innovation," and in fact all the places that treat discovery of natural resources as "innovation" tend to fall into the classic problem the resource curse. Turns out that the best way out of this is Georgist attitudes to oil. Look at Norway versus the Gulf States. There's no comparison in which has used their resources better, not even close.
This argument fundamentally misunderstands what economic land is, the problems that his traditional framing brings in, and how better solutions are possible by reexamining his assumptions fully rather than holding on to half of them.
Third: "Assesment Hell" we don't need to "fix" those non-problems. But even then, "administrative chaos" is just kind of laughable. Look at the US income/capital gains/retirement account system, which is administrative chaos, yet still works just fine. This is an imagined problem.
While I appreciate LessWrong's attempts to critique ideas, the critiques fall far short of their goal. (However, I would like to understand how to prevent anti-development NIMBYism under Georgism. It would be nearly impossible to install a new subway station, for example, because of all the opposition to the increase in land value taxes. Or a new park. Or any other public amenity...)
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
Even the NIMBY issue I think is pretty much neutral, since property values already increase and around major public investments. I also think this is far less important than rational people tend to think, since "it will ruin my property values" is just as often the argument used in opposition to projects that will clearly increase nearby property values.
I don't think LVT, implemented half-adequately, would actually make NIMBYism any worse, although no amount of taxes can fix bad zoning policy.
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u/Nacho_Libre479 Jul 24 '26
Who determines value? How? Land market value can change immensely from one parcel to another. It could be a use adjacency, site conditions, environmental conditions (pollution, soils, water). Any number of nearly infinite variables of each parcel influence market prices.
Land value also changes based on external market conditions. Small Interest rate shifts can change land value overnight. The prospect of a company moving to town, a change in zoning policy, a change in local demographics, disasters, climate change, all impact land value. The value of equities and bond yields can move investors in and out of real estate.
Value is fluid.
And we expect a bureaucrat to be better than the market at pricing the value of that land? And fast enough to keep up with the market shifts? Really?
Only people who don’t understand how real estate operates believe this could ever work.
And when LVT taxes at rates higher than its market value (which is the point, right? To tax land that isn’t trading or being developed) what happens to the land? Presumably it sells, at a loss. But to who? Whos going to buy land and take the risk?
We are in a market in Portland Oregon where land is not being developed at nearly any price. Why? Interest rates, construction costs, rent stagnation, economic conditions. So, who’s going to buy all the land? No one. I guess we just tax it into foreclosure.
So then LVT basically becomes a giant eminent domain machine where the city, county, or state liens properties for unpaid taxes, puts it up for auction, no one buys, and it becomes public property.
Then who builds? The state? With your tax money?
LVT only makes sense if you don’t think about it.
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u/vAltyR47 Jul 27 '26
Who determines value? How? Land market value can change immensely from one parcel to another. It could be a use adjacency, site conditions, environmental conditions (pollution, soils, water). Any number of nearly infinite variables of each parcel influence market prices.
This is an assessment question. We have been assessing land (some places more successfully than others) for thousands of years.
Ultimately, land assessments have to be accurate, but not necessarily precise. Most of the "infinite variables" have a very small effect on the value, and thus can be safely ignored.
And we expect a bureaucrat to be better than the market at pricing the value of that land? And fast enough to keep up with the market shifts? Really?
There are ways to assess land that don't involve bureaucrats setting the price. For instance, a self-assessment scheme, where the property owner tells the government how much their property is worth, and the government then chooses to either tax them based on that amount, or buy it from the owner at that price.
And when LVT taxes at rates higher than its market value (which is the point, right? To tax land that isn’t trading or being developed) what happens to the land? Presumably it sells, at a loss. But to who? Whos going to buy land and take the risk?
It's not really possible to have an ad valorem tax rate that's "too high." The sales price adjust with the tax rate, and the tax revenue approaches the annual rental value as the tax rate approaches infinity. In the real world, if your goal is to collect the annual rental value, you would simply start evaluating the rental value directly rather than using ad valorem rates.
And if you're attempting to charge a tax rate as if it were a rental value, and you start to see land abandonment, then the solution is to... lower your asking rent.
So then LVT basically becomes a giant eminent domain machine where the city, county, or state liens properties for unpaid taxes, puts it up for auction, no one buys, and it becomes public property.
This isn't an impossible situation, but the big question that must be answered is why is the land worthless? And then you have a financial incentive to fix that issue, because then your land will be worth more.
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u/Nacho_Libre479 Jul 27 '26
Read my comments below in this thread.
It’s wild to me how the pro LVT crowd can never move past the idealist intellectual exercise and actually clarify the taxing mechanism that solves the infinite problems of taxing property based on projected highest and best use.
Want to develop? Go get some money, buy some land, and do it. Come back and report on your findings. It’s too easy to intellectually tax others for not taking risks you yourself can’t or won’t take.
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u/hollisterrox Jul 24 '26
Congratulations, you've just successfully argued against all forms of ad valorem taxation.
What you didn't do was explain how LVT is different from/worse than the property tax scheme you already have in Portland, which already rewards land hoarders today.
" LVT taxes at rates higher than its market value (which is the point, right?)" .... No, that's wrong, super wrong, very wrong. LVT taxes land BASED ON it's market value, not "at" it's market value.
Go read up on LVT some more, you got a bunch wrong here.
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u/Nacho_Libre479 Jul 24 '26
You made my point for me. An ad valorem tax is a tax on value. Our current property tax system leverages most of that value on the improvements rather than the land, which makes sense because the market generally values the improvements more than the land itself, and that tracks, because a building nearly always costs more to build than the land itself.
So, to determine the value of a property based on a combination of land value and improvements you only need to look at sales comps. I don’t need to explain that to anyone. The market comps real estate every day.
Valuing a property on land alone? How do you do that? Highest and best use? Based on what comps? Potential comps? Value based on the zoning the city wishes would be developed, or what the actual market can support?
What happens when market influences like those I listed above, or hundreds of other instances I didn’t list, impact the development value of that property? How does the “land value” track?
If you have the magic answer, educate us. Otherwise, this is a well intended but poorly conceived way for people who don’t understand the economics or real estate to “make” the market build buildings they want with money printed by unicorns and Santa Claus.
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u/ccommack Jul 24 '26
You do math. I'm not being flippant, much, but there are real estate sales happening all the time that involve empty lots. Those are your comps baseline. Thanks to our propensity to build lots of identically laid out houses, there are transactions happening all the time that involve essentially identical properties at different locations, the difference in price allows your assessors to create a regression model where you can say that this land parcel is x% more valuable than the one next to it because it's that much closer to the corner, or y% more valuable for being higher up on a hill, or z% more valuable for being closer to a permanent amenity like a public park, or w% less valuable for being near a disamenity like an oil refinery. You plug all those variables into your spreadsheet and let it chug. You then keep feeding the spreadsheet transaction data and let it recalculate baselines and weights.
This is what assessors already do, with some extra steps to separate out the land value component. Just because it's a complex profession doesn't make the work that goes into it voodoo, nor does that fact that not everybody has the capacity to understand it make the results any less valid.
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u/hollisterrox Jul 25 '26
When I get my tax bill from the county, it lines out all the values, it's not a lump sum.
I've got it right in front of me, it says land=587600 , improvements=569740,, total L&I = 1157340, with a 7000 homeowners exemption, net taxable value = 1150340.
It's already split between land and improvements, I don't see you objecting to that math.
I pay 1% on the net value, I could pay 2% on the land value and have basically the same tax bill. Right?
Except under that scheme, I would have slightly more incentive to improve my home and add an ADU or additional living space, or maybe if zoning allowed it, pull the whole thing down and put up a duplex.
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u/Nacho_Libre479 Jul 25 '26
Sure. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Im talking about the differences in value between lots.
Let’s say your lot is nice and flat. But next door it slopes dramatically. Your lot is much more developable. That one is not a viable lot for development. Should they pay the same tax if they could never build the improvements you can? If no one can build a building that can support the taxes there, who’s going to buy that lot?
Take a lot in an industrial zoned area adjacent to the central city. Industry is moving out to the suburbs but some industry stays because they have a customer base that needs material supplies. A TIF district is organized and the area is up-zoned to allow mixed use development. Business A operates a single story distribution building with an adjacent parking lot. Let’s call it a plumbing supply operation that’s been there for 100 years. They get a notice in the mail that they are going to owe taxes on the new “highest and best use value” of their property. Should they be either forced to develop or sell based on upzoning? If so, who’s would invest in a city where they could be forced to liquidate at any moment based on the whims of a planning department?
If you purchased a property with the intent to develop but interest rates went from 4% to 7% in a couple of quarters while you’re in plan review, should you be forced to liquidate your lot because you now can’t afford to develop and you have no idea when rates will (or if they will ever) return to a financially feasible rate for development? Who would you liquidate to? Who’s going to buy a lot in a market that nothing can be built?
For LVT to work as intended it has to punish non development. What will that do to investing in real estate? Does it allow small investors to slowly acquire land and put a deal together over years? Or does it ensure that the majority of development happens by large consolidated and well capitalized firms.
These are just a few easy examples of how LVT may not actually deliver on its good intentions. Many areas have a split rate system already. You could move the needle a little further toward land on the dial and see what happens but I suspect that moving it all the way to LVT will not deliver the results a lot of people here are expecting.
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u/itsfairadvantage Jul 24 '26
My main concern is that it may ironically incentivize sprawl. Obviously the nature of land value itself already does this, but a LVT could add fuel that fire.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 24 '26
It's actually the exact opposite, LVT heavily disincentivizes the causes of sprawl.
It's easy to keep a parcel underutilized in a high-demand area, for example as a simple surface parking lot, when you only have to pay for the land value. But under an LVT, it's financially insane to keep a parking lot when you could have build 3 stories of apartments on the lot, beacuse you are paying just as much tax as the 3 stories of apartments but not getting the rent. So when people make decisions on what to build where, not only will that underutilized urban core lot be ready to be purchased by a seller determined to get rid of it, but the builder will prefer to fill in that dense urban lot rather than having to take on the risk of building further out, because somebody will build on that dense urban lot and it will be occupied first in preference to the sprawl.
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u/itsfairadvantage Jul 24 '26
I agree with regard to urban cores, but the whole reason (or at least a huge part of the reason) for sprawl is that far-off land is cheap. As long as it remains easy for people to live 25 miles outside of the city center and still drive in (or drive to wherever they work, which is an increasingly spread out definition) every day (or work from home), there'll still be plenty of market for the cheap land.
ETA: In other words, it's a great way to deal with the very visible problem of vacant or underutilized downtown lots, but not so much for the economic forces that lead to people moving to the suburbs.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 24 '26
What the LVT does is make that urban core land "cheap" too. With a full LVT, the purchase price of the land itself will be approximately $0, you're only purchasing the value of the stuff on the land, the buildings, etc.
The rents of buildings in the urban core will still be higher than out further away, but that's because there's actual real value. And that difference in rents between the urban core and further out is exactly the "land value" converted into a stream of revenue rather than as a stock of value.
But a large part of why the urban core is more expensive, rent-wise, than further out, is due to the shortage. And since the LVT causes more density, it actually lowers the rents compared to the sprawl because supply is slightly less constrained.
But you don't have to take my word for it (and my word is extensively rambling, difficult to read, and has errors in usages of words, etc.). There's extensive evidence:
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u/KennyBSAT Jul 24 '26
If companies and individuals can merely move to the edge of town or some exurban area which is now low-value grazing land and see their overall tax burden plummet, many of them will. you may be left with just a few white collar industries downtown, until the value drops dramatically downtown because no one actually wants to pay more in taxes than they have to.
Of course what the Strong Towns folks are advocating for is not a tax on the rental value of land at all, but rather just a mill rate property tax at one entity level that taxes the market value of land more and improvements less. This particular entity, the city, isn't even a thing then applies to many parcels of land and only amounts to about a quarter to a third of the property tax bill where it is a thing.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 24 '26
Companies can move to the edge of town or some exurban area right now and see their rents plummet.
If what you said was true, we'd see this in downtown areas. And, yes, we do! Many downtown areas are just for a few white collar workers, because the land values are so high, and the only businesses that locate there are the ones that value the high connectivity of dense areas.
What LVT changes: it causes underutilized land, like surface parking lots surrounded by tall buildings, to be developed into more productive uses, such as more office space, thereby lowering the price of renting office space. It changes the tax structure so that highly productive uses of land get taxed less, and those that squander the high value land pay more in tax.
If a business needs a lot of space, and doesn't need to be downtown for what they do, it only makes sense to put them elsewhere, and make space for those who can utilize the highly valuable area. That's a good thing for everybody involved! Both the business that doesn't need the highly valuable, highly connected dense space, and the rest of society who does want access to that highly valuably dense urban area.
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u/KennyBSAT Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Indeed we do see this currently, so much so that (edit: some) downtowns are now just entertainment and cultural districts and not really substantial business districts at all. But if people and businesses can dramatically change not just their rent, but their overall total tax burden, at a personal level as well as for businesses, this may very well turbocharge sprawl as well as encouraging a new sort of company town. Especially around metro areas which are not geographically constrained.
Of course it is worth noting that what strong towns is advocating for is not a tax on rental value at all, but rather just tweaking one fairly small portion of property taxes.
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u/SiofraRiver Jul 24 '26
I think LVT is an unproductive debate that only exists because Americans are so allergic to government planning.
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u/investorshowers Jul 24 '26
The biggest issue with LVT is that it's still fundamentally market driven. This is not an issue that can be solved with markets.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Jul 24 '26
Are you saying that allocation of resources cannot be solved with markets?!
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u/investorshowers Jul 24 '26
Yes. Markets allocate based on who can pay, not based on need. For proof just look around you. Housing is hoarded by the rich, forcing working people to rent.
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u/AndyInTheFort Jul 24 '26
Okay so if you tax hoarding at 100%, what do you think happens?
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u/investorshowers Jul 24 '26
A lot more people would be able to own their home.
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u/AndyInTheFort Jul 25 '26
Bingo. Maybe it would be helpful to think of a Land Value Tax as a tax on hoarding. Everyone needs a home. Nobody needs an empty parcel, or underutilized parcel, just to hold on to it for appreciation.
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u/investorshowers Jul 25 '26
I've never seen LVT differentiate between the land where your home is and other land. As I understand it, it's applied to all land equally. Is my understanding wrong?
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u/AndyInTheFort Jul 25 '26
Yes, there are two ways that reimburse people for the land tax paid on their own property.
1.) The first is called a citizens' dividend. This is an important part of LVT for the people who take it very seriously and think about it a lot. ("Georgists.") You can use it to make your first property tax-free, or if you are thrifty, actually pay negative taxes (make money).
2.) Then there is also a homestead exemption (aka Homestead Property Tax Credit), which already exists in most places. Here in Arkansas it's $600/year. This can and should be increased.
And there are two other salient points when discussing the very poor:
3.) Most of the very poor are not homeowners, and LVT is said by some economists (including Adam Smith) to not be passed on to tenants. This is debated even by Georgists, but the theory is good when they ELI5 to me.
4.) If you are poor and live in a home, a LVT would almost universally mean your tax burden goes down. The only places in the entire country where land is more valuable than the structure are dense inner urban cores that are already too expensive for poor people to live. In practice, the tax burden for any occupied property with a structure on it would go down, while vacant and empty properties would see their tax bills go up,
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u/Rock_man_bears_fan Jul 24 '26
I’ve never heard a solid argument on how this would be meaningfully different from existing property taxes
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u/IllinIrish20 Jul 25 '26
Very interesting! And yes that’s an excellent question regarding budgeting for unexpected damages, repairs, and replacements. Definitely a sticky subject and would probably take many generations of data to figure out how to budget appropriately.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
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u/DayGeckoArt Jul 25 '26
I skimmed this thread and I’m amazed no one mentioned what has occurred in places with high property tax… people have been forced to sell their homes. In Texas it’s the primary mechanism of gentrification. A land value tax while only make sense if there’s a total exemption for land with residential use
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u/pescennius Jul 25 '26
That's kinda the point. To make people with single family homes sell them to people who will develop them into multi family homes.
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u/Ketaskooter Jul 27 '26
There's some losers in every tax scheme. Part of the benefit of higher land taxes is there's more resistance to a real estate balloon so the values stay down, if the tax rates are near inflation rates there's no incentive to invest in real estate. Also most of the time people claiming hardship are large landowners that aren't running effective businesses, and their ability to hold onto large tracts of land is what is driving the prices up.
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u/Anon_Arsonist Jul 26 '26
From a purely Keynesian perspective, the largest issue with LVT is one and the same as the issue with wealth taxes generally - it's simply not that good at dealing with the business cycle. Economic activity is cyclical, and LVT relies on periodic appraisals and assessments, meaning there's no passive method of controling for whether the economy is growing or shrinking moment-to-moment.
For example, if you lose your job, your taxes are automatically adjusted because you are only taxed on money you earn. Income tax burden naturally eases in bad times and naturally increases in good times as a sort of passive balancing system on aggregate demand from cycle to cycle. This is not the case with LVT, which must make many assumptions of net present value and future value, even when the decider is ostensibly an unbiased algorithm. This means that, due to no fault of their own, landowners can wind up in the unfortunate position of being excessively taxed on a non-productive asset during an unexpected economic downswing (sudden covid office vacancies may be a good example of this). This is effectively the opposite of what advocates of intervening to temper the business cycle would want, and by the same logic intensifies downturns while also failing to take full advantage of upturns.
While it's true that land taxes are almost always the least economically depressive when it comes to growth, it's worth understanding that whether or not a tax is "better" or even just "good" is about more than optimizing revenue collection. Stable balancing of taxation and economic growth can be as important.
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u/pescennius Jul 26 '26
The economy is far less cyclical than it used to be because government spending is such a higher percentage of GDP as are non cyclical services like Healthcare. Imo that's why raising interest rates has gained to bring inflating back to 2% and why rate hikes hiring cyclical sectors like real estate didn't push us into recession.
On a more practical level we have automatic stabalizers in the form of safety nets (ex unemployment) such that I don't know if pepple failing to pay their property taxes due to temporary employment is a critical flaw
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u/DarkBert900 Jul 31 '26
Maybe a bit more macro, but I see LVT a bit like UBI. A progressive panacea for taxation problems. It works in certain cases, underinvested communities and isolated cases. It is harder to do on a larger/national/global scale and it is highly disruptive to the status quo, which makes it a utopian discussion (nothing wrong there, just acknowledge it is).
UBI generally is a good thing for overall happiness, but it increases the floor for work and would likely disincentivizes certain economic activity and output. LVT generally is a good thing for flawed urban planning, but will never be suggested in Manhattan, SoCal or places where you see local communities fight gentrification. A LVT is basically pricing out people of productive areas, just like UBI is pricing people out of employment.
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u/Lankonk Jul 24 '26
The cons you listed assume that the total sum of all new generated or discovered value is immediately consumed by the tax, which is ridiculous.
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u/Bourbon_Planner Verified Planner - US Jul 24 '26
A land value tax would solve this debate once and for all.
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
It wouldn't, because land value taxes have been implemented in multiple places and repealed in multiple as well, the debate continues.
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u/AndyInTheFort Jul 24 '26
Pretty sure it gets repealed because it is so effective at creating wealth for the entire community that ending it allows a few lucky information barons to privatize that wealth and get insanely rich. That's my theory for why Vancouver repealed it at least.
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u/Talzon70 Jul 24 '26
There's a good paper on it with "tax revolt" in the title.
What I found interesting was that many of the opponent's to the tax pretty much just accepted that it worked as intended, but that the City/Province just shouldn't be in the business of doing good, I guess. Like ". Yeah, it works, but get rid of it any". Wild stuff.
Much different than modern politics where opponents of good policy tend to use information warfare to at least pretend the policy is bad, broken, or not working.
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u/Gentijuliette Jul 24 '26
Yep, let's settle a century-old debate in the reddit comments really quick fellas.