Cat’s-paw (kats’por), n. person used by another to serve his purpose; a tool.
Those 1% who steal the public’s rent rarely have to defend their own position: they can usually rely on a volunteer cat’s-paw!
Unfortunately, it’s not at all difficult to tax everybody on their earnings or on their purchases – the trickle-down tax effect of which is to make the cost of goods and services at least 50% dearer than it should be. (No, dear reader, wages are ultimately NOT the most costly input to the price of goods and services!)
However, just you try to suggest taxing land values will reduce prices and raise wages without being inflationary, and the cat’s-paw suddenly becomes most solicitous about what this might do to home-owners, farmers, and the poor widow. They’ll have to be excluded, of course, so there goes your very tax base straight away – so why, then, bother at all with land value taxation?
Then there’s the person who believes that land value taxation is only about the SIZE of your land, when it’s all about its VALUE. And, they say, if you’ve got a big, beautiful house on a block of little value, you won’t be taxed much, whereas a person with a cheap house on a valuable block will be taxed more. (Yes, exactly, because the latter is in a more valuable location, maybe even ripe for redevelopment.)
[Another video demonstrates this.]
No; land value taxation has NOTHING to do with your income – nor should it. It has to do entirely with the annual value generated by the site(s) over which you hold ownership.
In cases of genuine hardship, exemptions to payment of the charge may be given, but for fairness sake, people should be equally, if not more, solicitous about home owners, farmers and poor widows having to pay more than double what they should on their every purchase because of our current errant tax regimes.
No, no, that doesn’t suit the rentier (nor his cat’s paw) at all!
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