The Korea Times has an article regarding a report calling for increasing land value taxes and decreasing income taxes.
Song Eui-young, an economics professor at Sogang University, "said that when the property tax rate is doubled to 2 percent, there will be more room to cut income tax rate by 6.6 percentage points ― equal to increasing the income of next generation by 9 percent, according to Song.
"He added that the younger generation, who don't have to shoulder property taxes, can save more, and then buy houses later.
"He referred to Milton Friedman, who said that land value taxation is the "least bad" tax.
"The advice comes amid the huge fiscal deficit that the government is facing after cutting income and corporate taxes.
"The government is scheduled to pull down the income tax rate to 33 percent from 35 percent, while the United States and the United Kingdom are raising their income tax rate ceiling."
Pretty sad when we find more economic clarity coming from Korea than Washington.
Even scarier when you consider recent calls for increasing the base for sales taxes in Indiana by extending the tax to services.
Let me make my position perfectly clear - as bad as income taxes are, sales taxes are diametrically opposed to the concept of free markets. No tax interferes with a free market more than a sales tax, which places the weight of taxation on the very act of trade. Sales taxes incur dead-weight losses because they interfere with free market activity.
On the other hand, no tax interferes less with free market activities than a land value tax. Henry George's Single Tax would remove all taxes from capital and labor. Only land value taxation recognizes the individual right to the property one produces.
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