Real estate developer Jimmy Gierczyk spent $1.5 million to build a New Buffalo station for Amtrak. It’s adjacent to his real estate development. The source article doesn’t give a lot of detail about the project, but notes that he can now more easily market his condos to Chicagoans. Who are accustomed to paying much higher prices than folks in New Buffalo, I’d guess.
All of which raises the question, why can’t Amtrak collect more of the location value it generates or preserves?
All of Henry George’s major works are now available for free download, but not all from the same place. Here are the links. Many of the speeches and articles have also been posted but I don’t know if anyone has inventoried the links.
We still hear sometimes that, in the Internet age, one can do business from anywhere. Simply not true, for a lot of reasons, and here’s another: Big server farms are best located where electric power is cheap, which in the U. S. can mean the Columbia River basin. Amazon is building a $100 million facility in Boardman, OR. Another source says that’s just for the computer equipment, the building is an additional $35 million. Google already is in the general area at The Dalles, where its facility employ 200.
…but part of what they work at seems to be under-reporting their taxable incomes. A paper (pdf) from economists Andrew Johns and Joel Slemrod estimates that folks with “adjusted gross income” below $50,000 understate their incomes by less than 7%, whereas those “earning” $200,000 to $1,000,000 understate by 21% or 22%. One reason is that the government monitors some types of income very strictly, whereas others are virtually unrecorded. So they estimate that 99% of the “tax liability” on wage and salary income actually shows up on the tax forms, compared to only 88% for capital gains, 48% for rent and royalty income and 28% for farm income. The research is based on 2001 tax year data.
It’s a bizarre subject to study. Researchers cannot know what “true income” actually is, but can only estimate it by looking at what IRS agents found in a sample of returns selected for intense audit. One intriguing assumption they make is that the IRS examiner’s ability to find hidden income is correlated with her pay grade.
Very high income taxpayers, over $2,000,000, are estimated to have a much lower propensity to underreport than their $200K to $1 million brethren. Do they hide less? Perhaps, but there remains “the plausible possibility that the misreporting of upper-income taxpayers is more sophisticated and thus harder to detect.”
All the estimates of under-reporting are looking at the tax laws as they actually exist, and do not consider the various special-interest loopholes to be anything other than part of the rules (pretending, of course, that someone actually understands the income tax code).
A surprising result follows from the “progressive” nature of the income tax: Even tho low income taxpayers hide relatively little income, their underreporting actually reduces their taxes by a much greater percentage than does that of the high income folks. [This is because, if your income is low, only a small part of it is actually subject to income tax.]
That’s the title of the newest work from Mason Gaffney(pdf), who doesn’t like all the credit-creating and deficit-expanding by which our rulers pretend the economy will be healed.
New money without real goods behind it means inflation, more imports with fewer exports, devaluation, and a real risk that our foreign creditors will rebel.
So how to free up credit? Continue reading How to thaw credit
That’s the title of an article by David Burns in the September Railway Gazette International. A long list of benefits which accrue to the community, such as reduced energy consumption, land use advantages, easier commutes, and cheaper freight rates, are noted. “Increased land values” are noted as a benefit but unfortunately there is no mention that these land values incorporate all the other benefits. A “property tax” and transfer taxes are among the methods proposed to collect these community benefits. Railways generally cannot cover their full capital and operating costs from revenues they receive for carrying freight and passengers.
Bob Drake’s abridged and modernized version of Progress & Poverty is now available in an audio version. Free downloads of the mp3’s, with financial contributions very much appreciated.
Everyone who gets to privately collect some of the rent wants to protect his take. So we read, in the Sept-Oct issue of Progress, that among the Exxon Valdez plaintiffs were “[f]ishermen who held $300,000 commercial fishing permits for salmon and/or herring fisheries at the time of the spill [who] now own pieces of paper worth around 10% of their former value.”
The Texas General Land Office is that state’s oldest agency, and originally responsible for giving out land titles. But today it continues to manage 20.3 million acres of land and mineral rights. (That’s 466 square miles, just a tiny piece of the state.) Revenue, about $800 million annually, goes into the School Fund, supplementing the $22 billion already there, the income from which goes to public schools.
While this demonstrates that land rent can be used to fund schools statewide, the GLO is hardly a pure implementation of Georgist theory. It continues to sell (and buy) land, and gets involved in developments which might not make economic sense but benefit insiders.
I shouldn’t be surprised to read, in Fortune, that speculators are buying up sites with good potential for solar power generation. The article indicates that these are largely desert areas near major cities of the West, and particularly the Mojave near Los Angeles. Prices have increased from $500 to $10,000 (or more) per acre. Much of the site is government (BLM) land intended as a nature reserve; it’s not (currently) for sale but can be leased (prices not discussed in the article.) Continue reading Solar power brings more land speculation