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This kind of thing is making me think that more effort should be made for realistic land/property taxation; not only is that where a lot of the wealth ends up being kept, but it's fundamentally impossible to hide.

It needs proper cadastral property registration and a link to the tax system. It can even be privacy-preserving; the system doesn't need to care who owns the land, just that the taxes are paid.

For the UK I'd happily swap out council tax + stamp duty for a 1-2% annual property tax.




You might have to rethink your math, here in the U.S. property taxes average 1.15% already, and would need to go up to like 8.2% just to account for personal income tax (not including payroll taxes, social security, Medicare/Medicaid, and corporate taxes)

1. https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-ta...

2. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2017/04...


I wasn't proposing a total replacement of income tax! Certainly not overnight.


That might be pretty interesting for ownership of the big sporting estates in the Highlands.


I think the point is to tax land value, not land. You can buy well over ten thousand acres of land in the highlands for about $5,500,000 (i.e. the price of a really nice house in London) [0]. It's an enormous amount of land, but you can't really do very much with it so the value is relatively low.

[0] https://www.galbraithgroup.com/property/per170030-glenlochay...


A lot of highly profitable property isn't tangible.




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