I think you can imagine the difference between “I did some work and made this thing that is clearly better, but we might have a few kinks to work out” and “I did some work, and if I did it perfectly, it’s just as good as the old thing, but we might have a few kinks to work out.”
I think it’s exactly at the higher ranges that you are more likely to run into concentrated positions where valuations are not simply a total value multiplied by a percentage ownership.
What is Cargill “worth”? Suppose the families announced they were selling 90% of it on Monday. Would they get that figure?
What is Jensen Huang’s share of nVidia worth? If he announced he was selling all of in October, why would he not end up with that figure?
It’s quite different for a bank to lend Jensen (or Larry Ellison or Elon) 5% of that notional figure. They don’t need to care whether the true value is 30% or 50% of the notional to make that loan.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution would like a word (assuming you’re contemplating a federal wealth tax; states could do it, at the risk expressed in the headline of the article we’re discussing).
That is what makes the timeline GGP laid out impossible:
> We can pass a wealth tax tomorrow and it’ll suddenly be taxable.
Unless we don’t share a common definition of “tomorrow” or “suddenly”. (For reference, the 16th Amendment process took about 3 years and 7½ months from Senator Norris Brown’s initial formal proposal to ratification by the then-necessary 36th state. [You would need 38 states today.])
Maybe. If my complaint was "tomorrow is Saturday, you can't pass it on a Saturday, duh...", then yeah, I'd absolutely be reading "tomorrow" and "suddenly" too literally.
When you meant "shortly before Memorial Day of 2030", it's not clear that 51% of the misunderstanding is on the reader.
“Beat it, grandma!” “But I’ve lived here all my life, my husband has passed, and all my friends live here!” “Not for long; we’re kicking them out, too!”
That line of thinking sounds insanely unpopular to me and while it might be more efficient in some ways, I think its unpopularity makes it unlikely in a democracy.
In Massachusetts it’s legal to pass on real property tax increases during the term of a residential lease, provided the lease contains specific clauses. (Most leases do, as a result.) And most commercial leases are triple-net, meaning the tenant is also on the hook for increases.
I would be surprised if most land consumption taxes (whether structured as property or land) would not get directly passed through to the beneficial consumers of that land quite quickly, or for their privilege to consume that land to be terminated/non-renewed at the expiration.
One of the benefits of a land value tax is that it has zero dead weight loss: because there's a fixed supply of land, the tax won't cause less of it to be around, and you don't lose out on the beneficial transactions that property tax can prevent.
There are several key benefits and I like the theoretical soundness.
My primary concern is that there are generally no market comparables for undeveloped land in developed areas.
If I believe it’s over-stated, I can appeal my property tax assessment by using comparables for nearby developed property. There is no equivalent market-based process for land values alone.
This is a reasonable and common concern, and one I shared until I looked into it in fine detail. Turns out it's far easier to estimate the value of land that things sit on than the entire property value, and most of the country actually operates on continually updated estimates of total property value rather than just land.
There's several anchoring sales nearby, you can regress out from all sales, etc. etc. And it's smoothly varying for nearby parcels, with very little change!
I will read that link later tonight (thanks!), but this still seems like a system where a particular property owner could be “targeted” (politically or economically) and suffer without reasonable legal recourse.
It's actually much harder to target a particular owner, because it's based only on land area, and the value of land in a general area! Property taxes are much much more susceptible to targeting as individual properties are much more variable and there's far more judgement about individual buildings and the potential value of a building.
Great! I’ll take all the oceanfront/riverfront land in an area and all the land immediately adjacent to major metro stops, please.
This highly local variation in land value does not seem to be adequately addressed n the California link above either (other than “The estimation runs at the level of each property category within each California county or census tract, using parcel-level data”, which does not seem fine-grained enough to cover waterfront property).
Surely the land value overlooking La Jolla or Malibu is worth far more than the lots just one block back. And those lots are likely to have more expensive improvements on them in any taxation system, but at least in a property taxation system there is a direct market reference to come back to rather than just an assessor’s judgment.
How much is the dirt at 28824 Cliffside Dr, Malibu worth? $5M? $25M? $50M? $75M? What does the census-tract level estimate come up with? How does that compare to 28867 Cliffside with an ever-so slightly larger lot, both in Census tract 8004.12?
In California some percentage of certain developments need to be rental controlled, so those are exempt from increases for those lower income folks, but I'm sure the difference would be spread out among everyone who isn't rent controlled.
Plumbing for new construction, plumbing for HVAC retrofit (even boilers and heat pumps might be further split), and emergency plumbing service tech (for leaks, water heater replacements, and blocked sewer lines) all seem different enough to me to make making clear what experience you had relevant in plumbing.
I’m willing to be communicative and try to be helpful right up to the line where it puts me, my family, or my company at risk of some asymmetrically bad outcome.
Regardless of whether it’s due to a low-trust society, a litigious society, or El Niño, I will refrain from giving specific feedback if that puts those groups at risk.
Almost every place when I’ve done campus recruiting treats it like bulk hiring of good raw talent. I hated it when I first saw it on the employer side, but it’s pretty practical.
I agree that every applicant should get a response (probably 2, 1 immediately of “hey, got your application” and a second of “not proceeding” or “we’d like to talk”).
I think one thing that job seekers often miss is just how ridiculous the firehouse of low quality applications is. They know they’re competent, but they can’t accurately estimate how many others aren’t and have built up (or borrowed) machinery that lets them apply to hundreds of job postings per day. That level of noise is what causes things to have to be automated on the inbound side as well and where automated scoring tools or gates before talking to an actual human come from.
I still agree you should get a reply, but the first two are overwhelmingly likely to be automated.
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