Twelve Ways to Sell Property Tax Reform*

Abstract

So MANY competent economists are pretty well agreed that improvement values should be taxed much less and location values should be taxed much more that property tax reform is hardly an economic issue today (1). Of course many land speculators are still trying to make the voters think it is a question that remains in the realm of debate. But the economic need for property tax reform is so overwhelming that it is winning fair consideration. Property tax reform today has become mostly a political question and a political problem-a political problem of how to get enough voters to understand which side their bread is buttered on; a political problem of how to get more politicians to believe they could win more votes at the next election if they would come out for property tax reform instead of against it; a political problem with the multi-billion dollar vested interest in land speculation fighting hard and dirty to block any change. So property tax reform won't get very far unless and until property tax reformers begin paying a lot more attention to its political aspects and give a lot more thought to what they could learn from smart politicians at City Hall and to what they might learn from their few past political successes and their many past political failures. In all the 95 years since Henry George's Progress and Poverty caused a world-wide sensation neither he nor his followers have been able to persuade even one United States city or state to apply his teaching as he taught it-not even Hawaii and not even Pittsburgh, in both of which land is still so under-assessed as compared with improvements as to more than offset (in Hawaii) or almost offset (in Pittsburgh) the partial application of the graded tax plan there. This 95-year record of almost complete failure to sell a good and muchneeded product should make it more than obvious that it is high time to try a better approach. Nobody needs a Gallup poll to prove that the property tax has surfaced as a central political issue of the 1970s, writes the director of the joint Harvard-MIT housing study. The 1972 presidential campaign