Land Royalty

A combination of Universal Basic Income and Land Value Tax, this proposal seeks to solve poverty and increase prosperity in a Georgist manner.

To calculate how this will work, we first determine the absolute poverty line. In Canada, this is roughly $15,000 a year. To support this kind of payout in the form of a universal basic income to every Canadian, we would need $15,000 x 37,000,000 Canadians or $555,000,000,000 annually. Canada has 9,984,671 sq km of land, of which 11% is privately owned. That’s 1,098,313.81 sq km of land which works out to $505,320.06 per sq km or about $0.51 per sq metre.

However, the average farm is 778 acres or over 3 million sq metres, and it seems unfair to force farmers who make our food to pay so much, so we can adjust this to exclude the 160,155,748 acres of farmland or 648,127.32 sq km.

1,098,313.81 - 648,127.32 = 450,186.49 sq km

That works out to $1,232,822.42 per sq km, or $1.23 per sq metre or about $0.11 per sq foot. If the average Canadian housing lot is about 10,000 sq feet, then the average Canadian household of two adults will pay about $1,100 a year and receive $30,000 a year, resulting in a net $28,900 in income, which split between them is $14,450 per person.

And that, is how you end poverty.

And also reduce land speculation from foreign investors that tends to lead to housing bubbles, discourage big corporate developers from creating ungainly suburban sprawl with space inefficient strip malls and parking lots, and encourage more walking friendly neighbourhoods. The perks go on when the incentives are in the right place.

Now, a further issue remains that this tends to benefit urban populations more at the expense of the rural areas, even with the farmers exemption. A possible solution is to change the granularity of the calculation. So, instead of using all of Canada, we could calculate according to the population and area of a given region. This would mean that the royalty would be lower in low population density regions than in high density ones.

Page last modified on January 03, 2019, at 09:00 AM
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