If Alanna's stats are correct only 30% of the US pop actually have a full time job.What are the other 210 million doing?No wonder the country is in dire straights.

About half of the Aust.pop works and we have huge bureaucracies to support as well as 1.5 million social security recipients.[excluding old age pensioners]

A major problem for the US is the trillions they spend on weapons to maintain the balance of power on this planet.They also have enormous problems with illegal immigrants just crossing their borders at will.They are rapidly achieving third world status with crime and corruption soaring and need to search for the root causes for their demise. Throwing the past PC attitudes out the window would be a good start.

Perhaps they need to think about manufacturing once again and limit cheap imports from China.There are a whole miriad of reasons for the demise of a country from social,economic,genetic,values,ethics, general attitudes,discipline,incentives,family stability and aspirational motivations to consider.Once the grip of poverty takes hold,it is very hard to reverse as demonstrated by our African Nations.

I don't believe any nation really wants a pool of poor.Poverty brings about political and economic instability.Real wealth for all, exists in the minds of your people and there is no economic or social advantage in keeping people poor and ignorant.

Taxes on land are a tax on past and current speculation. If savings in productive investments are taxed less than resource holdings then investment will shift.

incentive to save = zero,
Shifting taxes from production to resource use increases producity and reduces net taxation. Marginal propensity to save increased.

voluntary savings = zero,
See above.

compulsory savings = limited by duress,
As above.

private investment = zero,
Private investment shifts and net taxation reduced = more private investment

public investment = no match,
As above.

innovation = minimal,
Innovation increased as investments move to technology rather than resource holdings.

economic growth = zero (or worse),
Economic growth increases significantly as production is released from the dead-weight loss in taxes on goods and services. Empirical evidence shows that everywhere a land tax is introduced and taxes on goods and services reduced, economic growth increases.

market capitalisation = reduced,
As investment.

Quote from Milton Friedman from Human Events, November 18, 1979. He followed with;

"There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise -- and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago."

You will find followup comments in his correspondence with William Newcomb (President, Media Foundation for Land Economics) in that year.

The position is supported by another Nobel prize winner in economics, Paul Samuelson.

"The striking result is that a tax on rent will lead to no distortions or economic inefficiencies. Why not? Because a tax on pure economic rent does not change anyone's economic behavior. Demanders are unaffected because their price is unchanged. The behavior of suppliers is unaffected because the supply of land is fixed and cannot react. Hence, the economy operates after the tax exactly as it did before the tax--with no distortions or inefficiencies arising as a result of the land tax."

and another Nobel prize winner in economics, Robert Solow

"The user of land should not be allowed to acquire rights of indefinite duration for single payments. For efficiency, for adequate revenue and for justice, every user of land should be required to make an annual payment to the local government equal to the current rental value of the land that he or she prevents others from using."

and by another Nobel prize winner in economics, William Vickery

"Economists are almost unanimous in conceding that the land tax has no adverse side effects. ...Landowners ought to look at both sides of the coin. Applying a tax to land values also means removing other taxes. This would so improve the efficiency of a city that land values would go up more than the increase in taxes on land."

Friedman (capitalist), Samuelson (Keynesian), Solow (conservative), Vickery (radical) cover a comprehensive political and economic spectrum.

The main problem with this argument,

"The user of land should not be allowed to acquire rights of indefinite duration for single payments. For efficiency, for adequate revenue and for justice, every user of land should be required to make an annual payment to the local government equal to the current rental value of the land that he or she prevents others from using."

Is that no distinction is made between a "user" of land and an "owner" of land. And whether you, or anyone else thinks otherwise, the OWNERS of land have already acquired rights of indefinite duration for a single payment of a capital nature. And a move to capture all of the benefits of ownership by the state is clearly a "taking" of property.

And your assertion that land ownership is not "past savings" but, rather, past speculation, makes it very clear to me that you have never actually paid a mortgage yourself.

Your list of economic experts appear to have projected some, as yet unproven, benefits without having actually conducted a real life experiment. And what they have left out of the projection is the reverse multiplier effect of diminished (confiscated) capital.

When you and your mates have actually tried and tested this whimsy on a real live economy, (and survived the truck bombs) then do come back to us with some hard evidence

Do you seriously think that Nobel Prize winners would make theoretical claims without "real life" evidence?

What do you call Alanna's examples of Pittsburgh and other cities in Pennsylvannia?

Here's some more.

1. California, 1890s. The state government passed the 1887 Wright Act which allowed communities to irrigate districts and pay for them by taxing the resultant rise in land value.

In ten years, the Central Valley was transformed into over 7,000 independent farms. Over the next few decades, those tree-less, semi-arid plains became the "bread basket of America", one of the most productive areas on the planet. Thanks to land tax.

2. New York City, 1920s. After World War I, many New Yorkers suffered from lack of housing. To solve the problem, Governor Al Smith persuaded the New York legislature to pass a law allowing New York City for the next ten years to tax land but not the buildings on it.

New construction more than tripled providing more housing, and lower cost apartments, there were more jobs and higher wages for construction workers, and more business for merchants who sold goods to the employed workers.

Economic good times in New York came to an end, though, when owners in 1928 began to anticipate the expiration of the tax-shift law and building ground to stand-still. Some claim this was the predecessor to the Great Depression. ("How New York Solved Its Housing Crisis",Charles Johnson Post, 1931, Schalkenbach Fdn, Mason Gaffney, 2001)

3. Taiwan, 1950s. In old Formosa hunger afflicted the majority of people; less than 20 families monopolized the entire island. A follower of Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist Chiang taxed farm land according to its value. Landowners sold off their excess to farmers at prices the peasants could afford.

From 1950 to 1970 hunger was ended and Taiwan set world records with growth rates of 10% per annum in their GDP and 20% in their industry. (Fred Harrison, Power in the Land)

4. Denmark 1950s-1960s
In 1954 the land taxation commission, declared that they would support a gradual change from income tax to land tax. This result had an interesting effect on the fortunes of the DJP, which got nine seats at the election in 1957. It entered into government responsibility by forming a coalition with the Social Democrats and the Radical Liberals.

Anticipating a higher rate on land, investors switched from land speculation to real enterprise. One year later, inflation had gone from 5% to under 1%; bank interest dropped from 6.25% to 5%. By 1960, 100,000 unemployed in a country of just five million had found jobs and at higher wages, the highest widespread pay raise ever in Danish history. (The New York Times editorial, "Big Lesson From A Small Nation", 1960 October 2)

In the next election landowners went on a PR offensive; the Justice Party lost its seats, the land rate lost its boost, and investors again became land speculators. Quickly inflation climbed back up to 5% and by 1964 reached 8%. Land prices began to sky-rocket, from 1960 to 1981 increasing 19-fold while prices of goods and services went up merely fourfold.

5. Melbourne, 1970s. Around Melbourne, some towns tax land alone. Dr. Ken Lusht, visiting from Penn State, found they have 50% more built value per acre than those that tax both land and buildings. Between 1974 and 1984 (last year the government released these statistics), coinciding with some recession years, the number of businesses in the towns taxing property decreased by 20% while in the towns taxing only land it increased by more than 10%. (Phil Anderson, Economic Indicator Services, Melbourne, Australia)

I could give another thirty or so examples, but surely these are sufficient for a mature and intelligent person to realise the efficiency and effectiveness of taxing resource holdings over production.