Tags
CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, deficits, fiscal policy, Henry George, Henry George School of Social Science, InsideSources.com, Land-Value Tax, LVT, Making News, municipal finance, recession, taxes, Wuhan virus
And now for something completely different. (Apologies to the Monty Python crew.)
As some of you may know, when I’m not blogging here at RealityChek or Tweeting like a house on fire, I’m serving as a Trustee of the Henry George School of Social Science. This economic education institution seeks to apply some of the truly revolutionary insights reached by George, a Gilded Age/Progressive Era American economist about issues of his day, that strongly resemble some of the biggest challenges of our own times – for example, the rise of economic inequality amid extraordinary wealth creation and technological progress, the replacement of so much productive activity with financial speculation, and the weakening of competition throughout American business as enormous industries grow more monopolistic.
George’s signature proposal was a “land-value tax” (LVT), which he wrote boasted great potential to penalize casino-type finance; reward productive investment and thereby foster production-based, broadly shared prosperity; and break up economically and politically dangerous concentrations of wealth.
Folks associated with the School and with “Georgism” have advocated for this proposal ever since, but we believe that the LVT creates yet another advantage that’s especially important today: Its adoption could place the finances of state and cities devastated by the CCP Virus-induced recession and collapse of tax revenues on a healthy, sustainable footing.
As a result, we’ve launched an effort to show exactly how the LVT could eliminate budget gaps in states and localities across the country, and I’m pleased to announce that the first of these offerings has just been published (as an op-ed I’ve co-authored) by the news syndicate InsideSources.com). Here’s the link.
Moreover, we’ve recently issued a policy brief containing much more data relating to New York City and New York State that you can read here. And in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be sending off locally customized versions of this piece to news organizations in dozens of financially squeezed regions, including detailed projections of exactly how much revenue entirely affordable LVTs could raise.
So keep checking in with RealityChek for info on these articles, and news of other upcoming media appearances and developments.
