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How to fix the economy, forever

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Scott Baker
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On this second, Georgist, point, collecting the land rent is fair, because the value derives from the public demand for land, particularly in dense urban areas where land value is also highest. And the best way to monetize the public wealth in land is to collect the rent on it for the common good. This also has the salubrious effect of ending real estate based booms and busts - the largest and worst kind until very recently - and much or most of rent-based economic inequality (monopolies are another big source).

After collecting the rent, Georgists split on whether that money should be used to pay for government services, and/or for some sort of universal dividend. I favor the first approach, with some minimum Basic Income Guarantee from anything that is left over; that would incentivize voters to demand more efficient government, since the dividend portion would increase for them then. The overall amount can't be more than the full rental value of the land (see estimate above), but actually probably less in practice because there needs to remain some small kind of market in land in order to value it properly; otherwise, it's just based on hypothetical computer models, and that's about as reliable as epidemiological models of the spread of Corona virus - not very much.


Both of these steps would be transparent, simple enough for the public to understand, semi-automatic - with the only decision being what to spend the stimulus upon, and there can be rules for that too - and sustainable for future policy - as the output gap decreases, so would the stimulus; it was closed in 2018. Former president Obama deserves most of the credit for that, though Trump was president when it just nudged above the potential real GDP line (see FT chart, above), probably about to produce consumer inflation, and certainly producing asset market inflation already, before the shutdown collapsed the economy.


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Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.

His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/

Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of (more...)
 

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