Thread by @GaryWinslett

Housing and Georgist Twitter, with a big assist from @mattyglesias, I think I have a good estimate of land value in the U.S.
Drumroll……..the total value of the privately held commercial and residential land is roughly...$35.97 trillion.
Here’s how I got that number. 1/

I looked around for a good estimate of all land value in the United States and couldn’t find one. All the estimates I found seemed unreliable, very dated, or were about all real estate, not just land. Even ChatGPT didn’t give me what I was looking for. 2/

Then I came across this nearly decade old Slate piece that @mattyglesias wrote. He was able to use Federal Reserve balance sheets to arrive at a pretty sound estimate. I used his process but with updated data. 3/

slate.com/business/2013/…

Basically, what it amounts to is using this Fed Reserve data to find the value of real estate held by households and nonprofits, Table B101 Line 3 and subtracting the value of residential and nonresidential structures (i.e. buildings), Lines 45 and 46. 4/
federalreserve.gov/apps/fof/FOFTa…

You then also repeat that analysis for corporate businesses and then again for noncorporate businesses. You can see how that breaks down here. That’s how I got the total of $35.97 trillion. 5/

Which means that a land value tax of 2% raises ~$720 billion a year in revenue. With that, you could eliminate income taxes for the bottom 90 percent of workers, make childcare free, and have high quality vocation training and apprenticeships. Here's how I got those numbers. 6/

According to the Tax Foundation, the bottom 90% of workers paid $460 billion in income taxes in 2019. We could eliminate that. Imagine how great it would be to tell 9 out of 10 workers, you don’t have to pay income tax anymore. *That’s* pro-labor! 7/
taxfoundation.org/publications/l…

You still have $260 billion left. Local, state, and federal govt combined, we spend about $58.4 billion per grade level a year for public school. So, in principal, for $180 billion, we could have public preschool for 2, 3, and 4 year olds. A big help to parents + boosts LFPR. 8/

As an alternative, instead of building out that public preschool system, you could just send out that $180 billion as checks to parents with kids under 5. Checks are easier and give parents more choice, public childcare gets more people into the workforce. Either helps. 9/

That leaves $80 billion a year for the kinds of apprenticeships, jobs programs, and vocational training that will help workers thrive in the 21st century economy. This is all back of the envelope math but it shows the potential of this idea. #Georgism 10/

It's worth emphasizing repeatedly that a land value tax does not tax people/firms on their property, only the underlying land. A retiree with a house on 1 acre in the vast majority of the U.S. won't pay much of land tax. It primarily hits super inefficiently used land like... 11/

Golf courses in urban areas, surface parking lots (especially in major cities), and NIMBYs near hot job markets like Silicon Valley. The big concern with property taxes is that it hits income-poor retirees with houses hard. This mostly doesn't do that. 12/

So there you have it. For a 2% land value tax, you get income taxes eliminated for 90 percent of workers, public childcare or its cash equivalent, and robust active labor market policies. And that’s on top of all of the other benefits of a land value tax like… 13/

Strongly incentivizing more housing to be built, disincentivizing inefficient uses, helping us build walkable and lively cities, it’s hard to dodge because land is where it is, it doesn’t penalize work or investment, and it’s progressive. There's your Georgism for 2023. End/