The gist of it is that LVT fundamentally makes no sense because land is fundamentally worthless, and so taxing based on the value of the land would simply result in either extremely low taxes that would require a meaningful decrease in state spending, or would result in mis-allocation of resources to less than efficient locations purely on a reduced tax rate, or would result in vast swaths of land being negative value since the profits that could be generated in them would not cover the tax.
Furthermore, LVT doesn't fix the underlying problem, which is that the state mismanages the earnings it receives.
I’m not the poster you replied to, but for starters, the problem is not that we don’t have enough money. The whole article is about how CA spent $17B and got so little for it.
So how is having even more state money via LVT going to do anything? We’re just funneling this money into whatever black hole it’s going into
Prop 13 distorts incentives. It's why we have private country clubs in the middle of Los Angeles, dilapidated shacks on Google's global HQ, and surface parking lots in San Francisco proper.
It's also why California has the highest impact fees in the nation by a wide margin.
We should end Prop 13 and make it budget neutral by ending our other taxes. But even if we repealed Prop 13 and then set the money on fire it'd be a win for housing.
It fixes nothing, and causes severe problems