Promote Georgism

Longer description of your proposed project

Georgism involves pushing tax burden onto land and land-like assets, and away from areas such as income, commerce, and property improvements. Removing the disincentive to build improvements could lower the cost of housing and improve the efficiency of the overall economy.

Our organization will be contacting local assessors, local politicians, state legislators, the federal government, and other officials as necessary to determine opportunities for Georgist policy gains. We plan to leverage recent successes, such as in the city of Detroit.

This 501(c)(4) will push for the actual legislation to make Georgism a reality. Currently, ValueBase has the ability to assess land and provide information to inform policymakers of the immediate consequences of their proposals, like how many people’s taxes would change and by how much. 501(c)(3)s such as Schalkenbach provide the intellectual and theoretical underpinning for Georgism via their research. However, these groups do not have the resources or the legal ability to directly push for legislation.

Georgism currently has the advantage of having elements that appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. It also has the advantage of flexibility - while fully replacing all other taxes with a land tax may be unrealistic in the short term, a small or gradual increase in taxes on land would still improve the fiscal efficiency, and would not represent a major upheaval to the vast majority of taxpayers.

Georgism is the rare policy these days that does not suffer from stink of being a liberal or conservative policy - it is a “good government” endeavor. It will be important to use the flexibility to try and achieve small gains if necessary. It could be that a change in statute or ordinance is infeasible, but merely convincing a local assessor to correctly assess land (as opposed to a status-quo below-market assessment) could still be an important step.

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

I am currently finishing 5 years as the State Assessor of Alaska, leaving the position to work on this project full-time. Being State Assessor involved speaking with local assessors, elected officials, and citizens about property tax law. I became a general-purpose expert on local taxation in Alaska, publishing the Alaska Taxable each year and speaking at the Alaska Municipal League. I also have several years of experience as a legislative aide in the Alaska State Legislature. While there, by coincidence, I worked on the legislation that likely makes Georgist policies legal in Alaska. I understand that I will be asking politicians to embrace a fairly radical change. My experience has given me great insight into what policies work and what scares people.

As for my background, I have a BA, double-majored in economics and chemistry at Amherst College, and a JD from the University of Virginia, focused on tax law. I briefly looked into becoming an actuary and passed the first three exams within a year. I have the technical ability to understand the nuances of tax policy, combined with experience in tax law, and an ability to explain these policies at any level of sophistication. I am also personally passionate about the opportunity to push for a rare policy free lunch.

Finally, I am going to be working full time on this project; I am leaving my comfortable government job with seven weeks of annual leave, alternate Fridays off, and all federal holidays, to pursue this because I believe success in this area will have massive positive impacts on the world. I will be working with an excellent team, the founders of ValueBase, Lars Doucet and Will Jarvis. When elected officials need reassurance, the ValueBase team is ready to provide excellent data to give them the landscape of who will be impacted by our proposed policies. Lars and Will also have excellent connections among assessors, government leaders, and sources of additional funding.

Other ways I can learn about you

Twitter: @jacaissie

Publication: Alaska Taxable https://www.commerce.alaska.gov/web/Portals/4/pub/OSA/taxable%20reports/2022%20Alaska%20Taxable%20Report.pdf

How much money do you need?

$100K will fund my work for roughly one year. Financially, this will help to leverage more fund-raising for lobbying efforts. The goal is to work in many jurisdictions, using the contacts that ValueBase has developed, and forming new ones. Any policy campaign could spend infinite resources, but the goal is to maintain a lean operation at first. Lars Doucet and Will Jarvis are personally seeding this effort with $15,000.

Links to any supporting documents or information

No response.

Estimate your probability of succeeding if you get the amount of money you asked for

70% chance of success in early policy targets

20% chance of early successes snowballing, leading to massive policy change

It has been a learning experience in these first six months.

Setbacks:

The most important setback was the State of Michigan’s failure to allow the city of Detroit to enact an LVT. Had Detroit been able to do so, they would have been an important example for other areas looking to adopt an LVT.
The “start small” strategy was smart as far as it went - we have reached out to numerous local activists and politicians who have expressed interest in an LVT for their city. However, the vast majority of states would require a change to state law, or even the state constitution to make an LVT legal. Not having looked deeply into the topic, my operating assumption was that the State of Alaska, whose property tax laws I know intimately, was likely the median in terms of allowing local governments to let their freak flag fly. It turns out that the State of Alaska is probably 1 of 50 in terms of allowing local governments to experiment with property taxes. This is a problem for any sort of short-term strategy - changing state law is significantly more involved than changing things on the local level.
I am new to lobbying, and while I’m not naive, the extent to which approaching an elected official with a great idea and a song in my heart is not effective has been surprising to me. I was fully prepared to make the argument “this reform will help you win elections,” rather than “this reform is fundamentally fair and will make everyone better off.” But it is hard to get in the door to even make that argument in the first place.
I have been dismayed by the knee-jerk reluctance of some urban liberals to this idea. Ultimately this is a market-based solution, and some anti-poverty groups seem more interested in ending capitalism than in fighting poverty. This is not a death knell for the idea, but it is a quarter from which I did not expect resistance.

Responses/Successes:

As mentioned, one of the reasons I was optimistic about wider, faster success was the latitude afforded local governments in Alaska. I have garnered interest in an LVT from several members of the Anchorage Assembly, and they will be looking at it as part of their tax reform package under their new mayor.
The strategy has changed to trying to work with local groups who are not necessarily elected officials, on the idea that they are experienced, and are constituents who will at least themselves get meetings with local officials. For example, we have been working with 5th Square in Philadelphia, an urbanist PAC, to try and explore the possibility of enacting an LVT there.
We have also been working with Pro-Housing Pittsburgh to explore the possibility of re-enacting the LVT in Allegheny County.
A message that has turned out to be important/winning has been that most of the benefit of LVT is achieved by taxing the very most important/valuable land. Aligning incentives to develop this land to its highest and best use has a much higher payoff than doing so with land 30 minutes outside of a city, or, say, farmland. And for now, a lot of the resistance is probably going to come from the suburbs or rural areas. Getting wins in the city core is going to be easier than trying to reform everything. In the future if there comes a time to reform taxation of suburbs or farmland with an LVT, some of the wrinkles will have been ironed out by the urban cores.