It also had a second rule set where a land value tax was implemented, and the winning condition was when everyone made a minimum amount of money.

A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements upon it.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.

Some economists favor LVT, arguing it does not cause economic inefficiency, and helps reduce economic inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have advocated this tax because it does not hurt economic activity, and encourages development without subsidies.

LVT is associated with Henry George, whose ideology became known as Georgism. George argued that taxing the land value is the most logical source of public revenue because the supply of land is fixed and because public infrastructure improvements would be reflected in (and thus paid for by) increased land values.[7]

It’s just a stupidly good tax policy, and we should be implementing it in more places.

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

It’s not, though. The classical factors of production, whence we get the concept of “capital” as a factor of production, has land and capital as clearly separate:

Land or natural resource — naturally occurring goods like water, air, soil, minerals, flora, fauna and climate that are used in the creation of products. The payment given to a landowner is rent, loyalties, commission and goodwill.

Labor — human effort used in production which also includes technical and marketing expertise. The payment for someone else’s labor and all income received from one’s own labor is wages. Labor can also be classified as the physical and mental contribution of an employee to the production of the good(s).

Capital stock — human-made goods which are used in the production of other goods. These include machinery, tools, and buildings. They are of two types, fixed and working. Fixed are one time investments like machines, tools and working consists of liquid cash or money in hand and raw material.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production

And it’s an important distinction. The fact that land is not made and inherently finite makes it zero-sum. Meanwhile, the fact that capital such as education, tools, factories, infrastructure, etc. are man-made and not inherently finite makes them not zero-sum. This distinction has truly massive implications when it comes to economics and policymaking. It’s the whole reason LVT is so effective, so efficient, and so fair: it exploits the unique zero-sum nature of land.

I got a positive one for you

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

Property taxes != Land value taxes

Further, it’s not a tax on capital; it’s a tax on land. It’s very explicitly designed to target land, as land has distinct economic properties that make it a prime target for taxation.

And yes, it does target speculative investments like those of Blackrock:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/54q68

They are taxed, but I think they could be taxed more and better. Specifically, we should implement a land value tax (LVT).

As for why LVT? In short, it’s just a really good tax. Progressive, widely regarded by economists as “the perfect tax”, incentivizes efficient use of land, discourages speculation and rent-seeking, economically efficient, and hard to evade. Plus, critically regarding landlords, land value taxes can’t be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.

As for the difference between LVT and property taxes? This video explains well how property taxes enable land speculation and disincentivize housing development, and how replacing them with land value taxes would alleviate these issues.

Further, even places (such as the Australian Capital Territory) that have implemented quite milquetoast LVTs have seen positive impacts on housing affordability:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

Better than a wealth tax is a land value tax. Key properties are that it doesn’t cause capital flight (you can’t move land), it’s almost impossible to evade (you can’t hide land), it’s economically efficient (it literally doesn’t even harm the economy in the slightest to implement it), it can’t be passed on to tenants (both in economic theory and in observed practice), and it’s progressive.

Plus, it incentives denser, transit-oriented city development and disincentivizes wastage of prime real estate (which contributes to the housing crisis). All in all, a terrific policy that people aren’t talking nearly enough about imo.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.

taxing the shit out of third homes for example

There’s actually a far more elegant type of tax that would have the effect you desire: land value tax.

In short, it’s a progressive, difficult-to-evade, and extremely economically efficient tax that – both in economic theory and in observed practice – cannot be passed on to tenants. Further, it strongly incentivizes new housing development, heavily penalizes real estate and land speculation, and improves affordability. In fact, it’s so well-regarded a tax that it’s been referred to as the “perfect tax”, and is supported by economists of all ideological stripes, from free-market libertarians like Milton Friedman – who famously described it as the “least bad tax” – to social democrats and Keynesians like Joseph Stiglitz. It’s simply a really good policy that I don’t think is talked about nearly enough.

Even a quite milquetoast land value tax, such as in the Australian Capital Territory, has been shown to reduce speculation and improve affordability:

It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.

Then tax land. Make landlords sweat if they fail to rent out units.

The solution to housing affordability is all about negotiation power. Currently, tenants in many cities do not have negotiating power because an overall shortage of housing and thus no credible threat of vacancy (and with no land tax, vacancy isn’t enough of a financial loss). Build more housing by making it legal and easy to build housing, tax land, and tenants will have far more negotiating power.

A good example is my city, Montreal. Thanks to being one of the most YIMBY cities in North America, we have far more missing middle housing than any other city of this size on the continent. The result? More power to the tenants, less to the landlords. And the result of this power? Not only is my rent waaaaay cheaper for what I get compared to my sister in Boston (we pay about the same, but she has 3 roommates and lives farther out, while I have 1-br and live right next to downtown in an insanely walkable neighborhood), but I also negotiated down my rent when moving in. The reason I could negotiate down my rent was because the landlord had a credible threat of vacancy, so they’d rather lower rent by a hundred bucks than risk vacancy.

The urban area is what people refer to as Paris. A good comparison is Los Angeles. Lots of people say they “live in LA” but in fact live in Santa Monica or Long Beach or Pasadena or any of a million other suburbs that together form the Los Angeles urban area.

When people say they live in Paris, 99% of the time they’re not talking about the arbitrary municipal boundaries; they’re talking about the urban area.

When people say they live in LA, 99% of the time they’re talking about the urban area.

When people say they live in Buenos Aires, 99% of the time they’re talking about the urban area.

When people say they live in Tokyo, 99% of the time they’re talking about the urban area.

“Urban area” is simply a term meant to capture what people mean when they refer to a city, unrestricted by the arbitrariness of municipal boundaries.

Letting the market decide the rent will not magically create more housing

Rent control does not create new housing either. The reason economists basically all say rent control is bad policy is because it drastically reduces the amount of housing that gets built.

If you want more housing, make it legal and easy to build new housing like Japan did. Tokyo is the most populous city in the world, and yet it’s remarkably affordable because it’s very easy and streamlined to build new housing.

In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted. After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html

Also, you appear to have a very uninformed view of who economists are and what they value. Economists, like all other social scientists, are academics and scientists. Believe it or not, economists are not a cabal of landlords wanting prices to go up; just about every economist will tell you the dangers of inflation and rent-seeking. You might be surprised to learn the surveyed beliefs of economists:

• The majority of surveyed American economists vote for Democrats instead of Republicans
• The majority are in favor of environmental protection regulations (EPA)
• The majority are in favor of food and drug safety regulations (FDA)
• The majority are in favor of occupational health and safety regulations (OSHA)

Further, the largest-ever survey on economists’ views on the climate show an overwhelming economic consensus on climate change:

We conducted a large-sample global survey on climate economics, which we sent to all economists who have published climate-related research in the field’s highest-ranked academic journals; 738 responded. To our knowledge, this is the largest-ever expert survey on the economics of climate change. The results show an overwhelming consensus that the costs of inaction on climate change are higher than the costs of action, and that immediate, aggressive emissions reductions are economically desirable.

Believing economists at large to be just a cabal of greedy capitalists is just as anti-intellectual as MAGA people believing climate scientists to be a cabal of Soros- and Gore-funded fraudsters.

You’re comparing only the cities proper. A better comparison is urban areas, i.e., the contiguous built-up regions, as stats for cities proper are skewed by the arbitrariness of municipal boundaries and stats for metropolitan areas are skewed by often encompassing large amounts of rural areas.

To compare urban area densities:

• Tokyo urban area has a population of 39,105,000 and an area of 8,547 km², for a density of 4,575 people per km²
• Paris urban area has a population of 10,859,000 and an area of 2,854 km², for a density of 3,805 people per km²

Tokyo is more dense.

Tokyo is the most populous city on the planet with like 3x the population of Paris, and yet it’s remarkably affordable. Why? It’s easy af to build there. Japan has a simple, nationwide zoning code that makes it extremely easy and streamlined to build new housing.

Clearly Tokyo has found the room. Paris has plenty of room.

Yeah, rent control is basically universally agreed-upon by economists to be a disaster for a city in the long term. If you want affordable housing, you need abundant housing.

Imagine 2 scenarios and imagine which one has cheaper rent:

1. There are 9 homes for every 10 households, or
2. There are 10 homes for every 9 households

It’s not hard to imagine. If landlords have a credible threat of vacancy, that gives the rest of us negotiating power. And negotiating power is power.

!yimby@lemmy.world

!justtaxland@lemmy.world

I honestly think many people don’t really know what freedom means. They think it’s a one-way street that means they can get whatever they want, but they never consider that freedom means other people can do what they want, too.

True Freedom™ is when the government forces every single person to have identical, ugly-ass front lawns for completely arbitrary aesthetic reasons, clearly /s

And that’s by design. Parking minimum laws were literally written with maximum demand in mind, not typical. Like, those parking lots are going to sit half-empty for 99% of the year, and we all collectively have to pay for it every day through pricier goods in stores (parking lots and the real estate they occupy ain’t free), pricier rent (it could have been housing instead), and pricier transportation (ginormous parking lots just spread everything out, meaning we’re forced to become more dependent on gas-guzzling cars instead of being able to walk to the shop for free).