As a fan of Georgism and Land Value Taxation I was hoping for a good rebuttal but I am mostly just left confused by this article. It spends a ton of time talking about the political environment (not entirely uninteresting) and almost nothing on the "failure" part. The two points raised were that it was too difficult to implement and less was raised than expected.
LVT being too difficult to implement doesn't make any sense to me. We already have a property tax system in the United States that is really complicated. When property is sold that fact is recorded at your local county registrar. Property taxes are then calculated based on the most recent sales price, the rate, your tax districts, there's usually limits on how much it can increase, all sorts of deductions, etc. This is calculated down to the owner level for every plot already - how can LVT be more complicated than that?
This line in particular stuck out to me:
"What’s more, in line with Georgist theory, the tax was supposed to credit owners for improvements they made to the land"
I think we're talking about different LVT systems here. The current property tax system takes land improvements into account (and charges you more for them). My understanding is that LVT should be a flat tax on acreage (different tax rates for different areas of course) that doesn't care about what is on it.
This article is attacking a very different LVT than the one I know.
In my reading, what it means by "What’s more, in line with Georgist theory, the tax was supposed to credit owners for improvements they made to the land" is that those improvements are excluded from the tax, IE that the tax is on unimproved value, exactly as you say.
It's true that calculating the unimproved value is difficult. There is no obvious "ground truth" except in rare cases where the improved value has been destroyed and the owner will need to rebuild for some reason. And while there are probably enough such cases to get an estimate of the average in a large city, just taxing against the average would be distortionary (a burden to those with a below average plot, eg distant from metro stations or other amenities) . And to make a more detailed estimate makes the process subject to political maneuvering.
This line in particular stuck out to me: "What’s more, in line with Georgist theory, the tax was supposed to credit owners for improvements they made to the land"
I think we're talking about different LVT systems here. The current property tax system takes land improvements into account (and charges you more for them). My understanding is that LVT should be a flat tax on acreage (different tax rates for different areas of course) that doesn't care about what is on it.
This article is attacking a very different LVT than the one I know.