I don't believe so. It's considered to remove distortions in land use, as compared to property taxes that include the value of structures. In other words, you get less vacant lots and more productive use of land. Which there are good arguments for.
But proposing to replace income and sales taxes with land value taxes, making it the primary tax -- which would necessarily skyrocket the land value tax to produce the same tax revenue at the end of the day -- would be extremely distortionary.
Thanks for assuming that it's an "off-the-cuff opinion", as opposed to what might have been gathered from a great deal of expert reading. I was trying to be polite -- unlike yourself, sadly.
As you can plainly see, land value tax is hardly the centerpiece of strategies to minimize distortion. In fact, it's left for the end of the last section of the article. Because while it's a proposal for sure, it's certainly anything but a consensus, in reality.
I'm sorry, but offhandedly dismissing opinions like you did there triggers snippy reactions from me.
That said your opinion is clearly not gathered by expert reading, because I've done that reading and it comes to a different conclusion.
If you're interested in optimal taxation, I'd skip reading Wikipedia page and just go read the 2008 Mankiw literature review on "optimal taxation in theory and practice" instead. It doesn't touch land value taxation (which is a niche topic) but is very accessible and a good read.
Second, when metropolitan LVT is studied, the theoretical social benefits are large bordering on the absurd. Here's a study by the NY fed:
I personally think the land value tax has a lot going for it, in contrast to a property tax. Social benefits are great.
But that has nothing to do with land value tax being the distortion-minimizing solution for optimal taxation -- which it isn't -- and is what I was originally responding to.
