MIND-BLOWN! Brand talks to David Graeber who wrote one of the best books I've ever read. They discuss the ponzi-scheme that is the current global economic system and explain how the debt based money system is controlled by the banks. They also talk about the inevitable debt cancellation that will have to come and giving everybody an individual basic income. Wish I could have been involved in this conversation. https://soundcloud.com/thehuffingtonpos ... st-week-01 So Brand and Graeber - in your opinion are they just spouting nonsense or offering real alternatives like I believe?

MIND-BLOWN! Brand talks to David Graeber who wrote one of the best books I've ever read. They discuss the ponzi-scheme that is the current global economic system and explain how the debt based money system is controlled by the banks. They also talk about the inevitable debt cancellation that will have to come and giving everybody an individual basic income. Wish I could have been involved in this conversation. https://soundcloud.com/thehuffingtonpos ... st-week-01 So Brand and Graeber - in your opinion are they just spouting nonsense or offering real alternatives like I believe?

"debt based money system is controlled by the banks"

Not controlling it very well though are they ?

Quote ="LeighGionaire"MIND-BLOWN! Brand talks to David Graeber who wrote one of the best books I've ever read. They discuss the ponzi-scheme that is the current global economic system and explain how the debt based money system is controlled by the banks. They also talk about the inevitable debt cancellation that will have to come and giving everybody an individual basic income. Wish I could have been involved in this conversation. https://soundcloud.com/thehuffingtonpos ... st-week-01 So Brand and Graeber - in your opinion are they just spouting nonsense or offering real alternatives like I believe?'" Of course there are other economic systems, indeed in extremis there is only one sustainable one: hunter- gathering. I am not sure that there is any that would support the current human population as well though. It will all end in tears however.

Quote ="LeighGionaire"MIND-BLOWN! Brand talks to David Graeber who wrote one of the best books I've ever read. They discuss the ponzi-scheme that is the current global economic system and explain how the debt based money system is controlled by the banks. They also talk about the inevitable debt cancellation that will have to come and giving everybody an individual basic income. Wish I could have been involved in this conversation. https://soundcloud.com/thehuffingtonpos ... st-week-01 So Brand and Graeber - in your opinion are they just spouting nonsense or offering real alternatives like I believe?'" Of course there are other economic systems, indeed in extremis there is only one sustainable one: hunter- gathering. I am not sure that there is any that would support the current human population as well though. It will all end in tears however.

Instead of writing off everybody's debts as the link suggests (which would punish people who tried to be prudent) I'd give everybody in the country say £25,000 which must be used to write off existing debts or if you are fortunate not to have that much debt you get to keep the extra, so anybody with no debt gets £25,000 for free.

I'd also nationalise the banking system and only loan out most new credit for things that actually produce something like new houses or new machinery. For mortgages I'd only allow 2 X yearly salary for the loan ammount or 3 X Joint salary for couples. I'd also create the interest money needed to pay back the debts and spend it into the economy.

I'd also throw in a law that bans anybody from owning more than two houses. Obviously this would crash the price of houses and send a lot of people into negative equity. If that is the case I'd allow them to hand back the property if they want with no debts attached or freeze interest payments on the mortgage if they want to continue living in it.

In answer to the title question. Yes.

An economy based upon free market lines but with much stricter regulations, employment laws and company taxation in order to incentivise companies to act in the manner we wish them to.

If we don't want unnecessary amounts of people employed in zero hours contracts (or any other employment issue) then give tax breaks to those who treat their employees well and whack up taxes on those who don't.
For instance John Lewis etc would get tax relief whilst Amazon etc would be taxed to the hilt.

We use certain types of both personal and business taxes to incentivise or disincentivise certain types of spending or investment behaviour so why not for issues such as employment or corporate social responsibility.

As mentioned, housing is a major issue and often a big cause for poverty. The prices are simply far too high caused in part by increased lending, too many buy to let and not enough housing built. As suggested, bring in much stricter regulations on house ownership and mortgages along with properly funded council housing. On top of that strict controls on the rental market, not only are house prices too high but rentals are far too high too. Not helped by the student rental market.

I would also say there needs to be much, much more transparency and responsibility from private companies. Including much more transparency about their ownership, their finance & taxation, their employment practices, political & charitable donations and sourcing of products/materials. I'd be half tempted to make them liable to Freedom of Information requests for certain things like public bodies. Though that would need looking into.

I would also steadily reduce "other taxes" such as VAT, certain duties etc and put more on income tax to get a fairer tax system and hopefully a better redistribution of wealth.

If we can get:
- more stable, better & better paid employment
- far lower house prices and rentals (alongside proper mortgages)
- & proper corporate taxation and responsibility
Then the economy would be far more efficient and far fairer than it currently is in my opinion.

There are other, more political, issues such as regional representation that I think are vital too but they're not directly economy related.

Forget income tax or corporation taxes.

Introduce Land Value Taxation and you could basically scrap all other taxes, relying instead on excise duties to (dis)incentivise.

Unlike people, land does not have a habit of offshoring, it tends to stay where it is

Not again - this is the most bonkers idea you have ever come up with and you have come up with a few.

Where in the entire world does this system exist and thrive - it doesn't, why is that because it does doesn't make any sense on any intelligent level.

The sole reason it has not been adopted is that those who stand to contribute most are the weathiest. Those individuals and corporations who already avoid paying their fair share of taxation by various avoidance techniques.

They simply wouldn't allow their political puppets to introduce such a progressive system



[url=http://stuartjeannebramhall.com/tag/singapore/Various places[/url

As to land tax, how are /should be values assessed? I am not au fait with the theory behind it,

Usually it is according to the maximum developed potential of the land. So the value of a hectare of heathland or forest would be less than a hectare in London. The level of infrastructure is also taken into account: why should a taxpayer in Inverness be paying for Crossrail?

But that's ridiculous. Who assesses the maximum developed potential? The infra-structure has been developed by someone (in the 19th century by private capital) and so they get penalised. I thought the theory was land was taxed based on it being undeveloped? That again has a problem, as it would encourage the whole country to be concreted over - a person owning it would be taxed and so would need to get value from it rather than leaving it as a nature reserve, or whatever. The whole thing seems utterly nonsensical and destructive in either case.

There are such things as planning laws.

A nature reserve (or other "green" land that has no development potential) may be given a value of £0.001p per hectare, whereas a site in The City may be valued at £1bn per hectare.

Look at the DLR: Real estate prices jumped massively along the route, some were empty sites, contributing little or nothing to the local economy at all. On completion, the owners of thos sites saw a massive increase in the value, while the UK taxpayer footed the bill. Is that equitable?

And when you ask "who will value the maximum developed potential?", it's not something that we have no expertise in. A massive revaluation went ahead during the 1980s in preparation of the Poll Tax. Look back to the conversion to North Sea gas as another example of a huge change in infrastructure. I can also remember the arguments against unleaded gasoline, with oil companies and their stooge politicians complaining that "it would mean AN unleaded pump on every forecourt.

The "Tax Gap" is too large, something radical needs to happen to close it

But the point is any land has "development" potential. So it's just ridiculous.

Yugoslavia thought there was an alternative. And I agreed with their stance. Didn't end too well for them, tho.

Maybe Russia and China can cobble together some kind of ideological pathway. But Western trans-national capital can bring some almighty firepower to bear on anyone bucking the trend.

They are bleeding Russia dry by flooding the oil markets with cheap crude.

In any case, the Russians don't seem too different. Their style of corruption wears only a different cap.

No, I reckon it will take a major war, population shift or calamity to shake the current corporate model. Which is usually the case with any dominant system.

It is only ridiculous if you look at it through closed eyes.

How can "any land" have development potential if there is no permission to develop it?

In 2007 the Valuation Office Agency conducted a study and it was estimated that the average price of land designated for agriculture in England was £9,287 per hectare, while for different kinds of industrial and commercial use it was between £630,000 and £749,000 per hectare, and for residential use it was as much as £2.46 million per hectare. So it's not too difficult to determine the value of the land and I'd suggest that's far simpler than determining the value of buildings. Tony Vickers, at the School of Surveying, Kingston University, is pioneering techniques to create maps that, instead of showing contour lines depicting topography, show lines marking off localities and zones with equal land values per hectare or square metre. So, it really isn't too difficult, especially given advances in computing and satellite imagery

A start could be made by using LVT to replace inheritance tax and stamp duty, unpopular taxes that only arise when someone dies or something is sold

Even that well-known, left-wing agitator Winston Churchill could see the problem. This from a Commons speech in 1909:

[i“Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.”[/i

If you look at the society's where it has worked their initial structures is very different from what we have here. The size of the economy of Singapore, Taiwan, Norway, Hong Kong is very different to the UK.

Who pays the LVT on hospitals, schools and local council/government owned land which will be significant. We want to encourage house building and inward industrial investment which realistically has to happen on green belt land - how will your development potential based LVT work in that case?

I am not as sceptical as I am sure you think, I am genuinely interested in understanding how you think this would be administered and how it would work.

Freeing up greenbelt land for development is simple, we freed up thousands of acres of agricultural land immediately post WW2. Land is bought and taxed at the current rate of use, so agricultural land would be valued and taxed as agricultural land, unless and until it has planning permission. Once that permission is achieved, the land is then valued and taxed according to its developed potential.

As there is no realistic development potential on land owned by schools, hospitals etc. the land will attract a very low valuation. With LVT, it is only the land value that is determined, not the buildings that are on them.

The first taxes that LVT could replace are: Council Tax and stamp duty

Do government owned bodies pay council tax, do the council pay council tax on the buildings they own ?

I know that government bodies cannot register for VAT and so effectively are "end users" as far as that is concerned so why would they pay tax to the department that allocates their budget from the taxation pot ?

If I gift you £1000 to spend on a project would you expect me to ask for £200 of it back as a "tax" ?

If there were no development opportunities on land owned by schools why has the government been selling off all the playing fields?

Are you suggesting that land say in the centre of London that currently has buildings sat on it would attract this tax or just unused green belt land?

Because this is no longer going to be a local tax but a national one and to make things fair it must apply to all. You can't say to a landlord/farmer you pay a tax on this land but a local authority is exempt that's not equitable and creates and unfair market.

The NHS still pays employers NI even though the money it pays in is recycled to fund it.

No, what I'm suggesting is that all land, apart from common land, is subject to LVT. One major benefit from this is the Land Registry can finally put names to the 40% of UK land that has no "listed" owner or tenant (although even landowners are only tenants of the Crown).

A school field, as a school field has zero development potential and would be taxed accordingly. Whereas a school field that is up for sale with development potential is no longer a school field, it is a field with development potential and would be taxed according to that development potential.

LVT would also mitigate against the land bankers who simply buy land and sit on it, paying little or nothing while the value of the land increases. Tesco & Asda used to be prime culprits, buying land around an urban development simply to prevent a competitor buying it. I previously mentioned the route of Docklands Light Railway: some speculators bought land along the route and allowed it to remain vacant (whether it had buildings on it or not), simply to cash in once the DLR opened. The infrastructure improvements along the route were funded from general taxation. Why should a speculator be allowed to profit from improvements paid for from the general exchequer?

On your last point there has to be a reward for the risk or nobody would ever bother to invest - what if the DLR had been cancelled or re-routed then the investment would not have looked so great. The rumour years ago was they would build a second channel tunnel all of a sudden land in a certain part of Kent got bought but that hasn't come to pass so the investment looks a bit sick now.

Would you grade the land for taxation purposes? if so how would that be done equitably and who would pay the tax the landlord or the tenant?

If DLR had been cancelled, then the land purchaser would have lost nothing, the land would be the same value without DLR as it previously was without DLR. I cannot understand how anyone can be happy with taxpayers funding unearned income for land speculators.

Land is easier to grade for taxation purposes than land plus buildings, as is the current system. Revaluing land + buildings wasn't so diffcult when Council Tax bands were set. LVT would be paid by whoever owned the land, it would then be up to them to pass on the charge to their tenants.

What you must remember, LVT is not to be viewed as an additional tax, it is there as a replacement tax and the one thing that can be said, it really is a progressive tax

The landowner would have incurred the opportunity cost of what else they could have done with the money. If the government want to run projects through private land then there has to be some compensation to the land owner - surely that is an equitable trade off?

Agree on the second point this could be done by post code - but would local councils not lose out - instead of collecting cash they would be paying out for the land they own or would the monies be re-directed via the government rebate?

I think you misunderstand what I said. I'm not talking about lanowners being compensated for having land compulsorarily purchased, rather I am talking about pure speculators who saw a chance to buy land, knowing that taxpayer-funded improvements to infrastructure would improve the value of that land. Many existing businesses along the DLR route benefitted from improvements in value, once DLR was finished. During this period they continued trading, often suffering problems associated with a major civil project that DLR would present during construction. The difference between them and the speculators was the businesses continued contributing in the form of UBR. The speculators paid no such taxes on their land or empty buildings.



At the moment UBR is collected centrally and then doled out to local authorities. LVT would be collected by local authorities and I imagine a subsequent reduction in the amount of UBR redistribution would ensue. Worked properly, it should see a reduction in the total taxes that businesses pay because they would then be "compensated" by those individuals and businesses who currently pay little or nothing finally having to make a commercial contribution