Abstract
“The land question” as posed by Henry George a century ago was answered with a call for land reform, a change in the ownership and control of land. In present‐day, market‐oriented America the land question is answered with widely available land information for market and policy decisions. Information generated by the Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey (AELOS) of the Census of Agriculture is a footing for analyzing land ownership, land transfers, property taxes, and other issues of land policy. In this paper the issues of ownership distribution and the distributive effects of taxation are defined with AELOS data. The AELOS shows that the distribution of land ownership is concentrated and shows that large landowners pay real property tax rates at less than half the rate of small landowners. Changes in land ownership, transfer, and taxation argue for repeating the AELOS in 1998. A case is presented for replacing the Census of Agriculture with a Census of Land in 2003.
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