A friend sent me a link to a page where one can make policy suggestions to Barack Obama's campaign. Turns out to be a thinly veiled way to harvest emails. But maybe somewhere in the campaign, someone might actually read the suggestions.
One of the fields was a dropdown menu so one could categorize one's proposal. I chose "economy" but made the first line of my policy proposal a list of a number of categories into which mine falls:
Issues: Economy, Energy, Environment, Ethics, Family, Infrastructure, Justice, Labor, Poverty ... and maybe even health --
Shift our taxes off productive effort -- manufacturing, retailing, distribution, and wages and sales -- and onto those who claim as their personal or corporate property the resources which rightly belong to all of us:
- first and foremost, the annual value of land. If the localities fail to tax it fully, then the federal government should do so. Taxing it fully means taking for common purposes the economic rent -- about 5% of the selling value of the resource. (Most cities collect less than 1%, and with urban land being worth as much as $500 million per acre, there is a lot of value to be collected.
- the broadcast and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. We SAY that the airwaves belong to the American people, but in fact, we seem to accept letting them be the property of the media companies and communications corporations. We should be collecting the annual value of that resource annually!
- royalties on natural resources. Why should the Jed Clampetts and the Exxon-Mobils treat OUR natural resources as their own PRIVATE piggy bank, with only small taxes on them? Why on earth should we collect low royalties and then tax those royalties only at rates equal to what we impose on wages?
- water and water rights. Did those who currently own them create that water? Why should we permit them to privatize that value?
- Lots of other similar things, which the classical economists categorized as "Land." ... Check out http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Land_includes.htm for some lists.
And don't let anyone tell you that these things don't have much value. At bottom, they are a large contributor to our wealth concentration (if you'd like to see the dimensions of that problem, see http://www.wealthandwant.com/issues/wealth/90-9-1_Tables.html).
More important, if we began to tax the things the classical economists called "land," many of our most serious social, economic, environmental and justice problems would begin to fall away -- problems that most people think are intractible.
So if your campaign counts among its concerns *any* of these issues -- sprawl, poverty, low wages, job creation, long commutes, greenhouse gases, oil dependence, income concentration, wealth concentration, poverty, asset poverty, safety nets, perverse incentives, boom-bust cycles, even immigration -- take a look at the ideas of Henry George (b. Philadelphia, 1839; d. NYC, 1897).
Start with these websites:
and then read a modern abridgment of George's best-seller, Progress and Poverty, at progressandpoverty.org/ The full title of the original is "Progress and Poverty: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth ... The Remedy;" the subtitle for the abridgment is: "Why there are recessions and poverty amid plenty -- and what to do about it."
We can solve these problems. They are related, and we aren't going to make a dent in any of them without enacting this reform.
If you wonder what others have had to say about these ideas, see http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/quotable_nobels.htm and http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/quotable_notables.htm
This reform might even help with health: these ideas will help create the density that will create healthy, walkable cities, which might help our obesity problem.
and, rereading this, I would now add that the stress reduction that this reform would produce in the bottom 95% of us would also make a tremendous difference in many health problems! (Might produce a bit of stress in some of the top 5%, I guess.)
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