StamfordCT

Is LVT the answer? It depends what the question is.

The title for this post was prompted by an article in the NYT about people not raised on farms deciding to become farmers, particularly in places near large cities.  It seems that local food was said to be the answer to a number of questions.  I'm generally in favor of it, but I'm not sure it is the answer to as many questions as its supporters claim.  That doesn't make "local food" a bad thing; just not the answer to as many questions as it might seem.

But the title for this post sprang to mind.  It seems to me that Land Value Taxation is the answer to a lot of very important questions.

The Colorado Self-Sufficiency Standard, 2008

Yes -- there is a Connecticut angle on this ... keep reading!

Link: http://www.cclponline.org/pubfiles/SelfSufficiency08_FinalProof.pdf
The newest Self Sufficiency Standard Study was published recently, for Colorado.   The SSS is a detailing of a no-frills cost of living which meets all the most simply defined needs but provides no frills.  I've spent a lot of time on most of the 30+ studies (mostly on one state at a time; a few on a major metropolitan area), and have mixed feelings about them.  On the one hand, they are probably the best assessment we've got the cost of a the-very-bottom-of-lower-middle-class lifestyle in various places in the US.  They use a consistent and logical methodology and tailor the findings to various configurations of families.  So far, very good and useful.

Fixing Wages, and Fixing Housing Affordability -- for All of Us

By this, I mean fixing the problem of low wages -- wages insufficient to support an individual or a family in conditions we consider acceptable on a reasonable number of hours of labor per week. I don't mean minimum wage legislation, or living wage legislation, both of which I regard as well-intentioned but ultimately destructive for the community they intend to help.  I don't mean measures like the Earned Income Tax Credit, either.  It appears that people must jump through high hoops to get those dollars (which often seems to require professional advice, at a price), and then a significant portion of the money goes not to the wage earner but to his tax preparer/advisor, in the form of fees and interest.

Earmarks, nightlights and windfalls - Individual, or Community?

I've heard this point made a couple of times recently, but particularly liked the way Gail Collins expressed it in her recent column, George Speaks, Badly:

Besides being incoherent, this is a perfect sign of an utterly phony speech. Earmarks are one of those easy-to-attack Congressional weaknesses, and in a perfect world, they would not exist. But they cost approximately two cents in the grand budgetary scheme of things. Saying you’re going to fix the economy or balance the budget by cutting out earmarks is like saying you’re going to end global warming by banning bathroom nightlights.

The relative magnitude of earmarks relative to total federal spending or total discretionary federal spending may be rather small.  But earmarks do have tremendous potential to do good locally. They can fund projects that may not be feasible for local government to fund, which can contribute mightily to local economic activity and economic rent.

The question, I think, is what happens AFTER the earmark project. Will the local community that benefits from that federal spending collect the benefit from the local residents who are benefited, or will that benefit keep accruing to particular individuals, and continue to be just a nice permanent federal gift to them? 

Working harder, making others richer

Bob Herbert wrote, in his 3/11/08 column entitled "Sharing the Pain", in part,

The American dream is on life support because men and women by the millions who want very much to work — who still have in their heads the ideal of a thriving family in a nice home with maybe a picket fence — are unable to find a decent job.

For years, families have been fighting weakness on the employment front with every other option imaginable.

• Wives and mothers have gone to work.   
  
• People have been putting in more hours and working additional jobs.
• And Americans have plunged like Olympic diving champions into every form of debt they could find.

Who has gotten the benefits of women spending many more years and many more hours per year in the workplace?  Who has benefited from Americans carrying more and more debt?  How does this relate to the run-up in the price of housing?  I said I'd write about these issues in another post.   This is it.

Closet Georgists and Georgites: Bill Buckley, and others

Link: Jay Nordlinger on Impromptus on National Review Online.

Since Bill Buckley died a few weeks ago, I've read numerous tributes, and a few have mentioned Buckley's abiding interest in the ideas of Henry George.  The newest reference comes from the opening paragraphs of a National Review article today:

Friends, a week ago I put some notes on WFB in Impromptus. (That column is here.) Want a few more notes? Just a few more?

You know that he loved peanut butter. Ate it every morning of his life. Took it everywhere he went (because sometimes you couldn’t get it). But did you also know he had a thing for coffee ice cream? Yes — a real jones for it. I introduced him to Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch — one of the best things on the planet.

(Yes, I know that they are communists or whatever. Just eat the ice cream.)

Note 2: Years ago, I had a spot of trouble finding housing in Manhattan. And he said to me, “Do you know I’m a closet George-ite?” He meant the 19th-century American economist and social thinker Henry George (author of Progress and Poverty).

How I wish that Bill Buckley, and others whose education was good enough to include exposure to the ideas of Henry George, had left/would leave their closets.  (Perhaps the reason has something to do with something related to pluralistic ignorance; perhaps it is something more nefarious.)

Bill Buckley did mention Henry George repeatedly in his writings and on the air, but in passing, as if to run it up the flag pole, rather than as a confident advocate of an idea that might not be popular with his constituency. 

Landholders, windfalls, productive effort and community revenue

I attempted to post this response to a blog, and ran into a technical error.  But even without the post to which it was responding -- which praised the so-called FairTax -- I though it worth sharing here. 

I'm still in Henry George's camp. Why tax the results of individual human effort -- stealing from the individual, or for that matter the corporation that which he/it created -- BEFORE collecting the economic value of that which the community created?