Wouldn’t the equilibrium here trend towards a bunch of wasted labor where I deliberately lowball the value of the land, and then if someone offers a larger amount, I just say no and then start paying the larger amount, thus having a potential to pay less tax but losing nothing if I’m called out for it? No downside to me personally, and if this became common, it’d be harder to legitimately buy stuff. Seems like you’d need to pay some sort of fee to the entity credibly offering this larger amount to make it worth it.
Hmm I don’t think so? If you buy land for $X, that’s the floor on what you could reasonably assess it at, which is basically the status quo world. So we’re in the status quo until someone comes along and bids up the price to their willingness-to-pay: Then, the asset either moves to someone who values it more, or you start paying higher taxes on it. I think either branch is preferable to the status quo?
Ideally you would want to allow depreciation though, which is a definite phenomenon! (Especially if things are neglected.)
Yeah, there’s some design questions. You’re right, the upside to the corrective bidders is naively nothing if they get called on it: they’re doing valuable corrective cybernetic labour for free.
Maybe a sensible refinement would be for them to be owed a small fee… or roughly equivalently some (temporary) direct share of the resulting increased Harberger tax.
Wouldn’t the equilibrium here trend towards a bunch of wasted labor where I deliberately lowball the value of the land, and then if someone offers a larger amount, I just say no and then start paying the larger amount, thus having a potential to pay less tax but losing nothing if I’m called out for it? No downside to me personally, and if this became common, it’d be harder to legitimately buy stuff. Seems like you’d need to pay some sort of fee to the entity credibly offering this larger amount to make it worth it.
Hmm I don’t think so? If you buy land for $X, that’s the floor on what you could reasonably assess it at, which is basically the status quo world. So we’re in the status quo until someone comes along and bids up the price to their willingness-to-pay: Then, the asset either moves to someone who values it more, or you start paying higher taxes on it. I think either branch is preferable to the status quo?
Fair point, if you add that you can’t assess it at less than you paid for it, this problem goes away.
Ideally you would want to allow depreciation though, which is a definite phenomenon! (Especially if things are neglected.)
Yeah, there’s some design questions. You’re right, the upside to the corrective bidders is naively nothing if they get called on it: they’re doing valuable corrective cybernetic labour for free.
Maybe a sensible refinement would be for them to be owed a small fee… or roughly equivalently some (temporary) direct share of the resulting increased Harberger tax.