What century are you living in that you've never heard of property taxes ?

DaFatal, like Hyenuf said, land is taxed by states and cities. More revenue is generated here than in income tax. It pays for the schools and the roads, something the Federal government only meddles in.

I don't know why you think agriculture is 'the biggest burden'--without it we're all sort-of dead. Having a oil shortage is a pain. Having a food shortage is called famine and people kill and die. 'Factory' farming of animals is very limited and regulated--the government even specifies the number of chickens you can have in a specific area. It's no fun, but we need to produce food for people to eat. A vertical farm is a factory, too.

Vertical farming? You build big skyscrapers to farm? Doesn't that sound like a waste of steel and a dangerous place to plow on a tractor? Use electricity to pump the water up, to move the crops down? Even the wiki article says that it's only been proposed, never done. No 'cides'? How will you kill the bugs? the weeds?

The government protects land, but more-so, we protect people.

The size of someone's house would only indicate the fuel use if you assume equal efficiency. New homes are many times more efficient than homes of the 1940s. And if the size of someones home was limited by how much land, that implys a farmer with a quarter section (160 acres- small for a farm to make a living from) has a large house? Why? There is no connection. I grew up in the country on a large place with a small house and we heated exclusively with wood. Water from a well, only an air conditioned living room. My parent's electric bill is still under $80 in the summer.

Funny, when you mentioned this as "Land Tax" it made me remember playing Magic The Gathering, the card game. When the "Land Tax" card comes out, the game is no longer fair--the poor steal land from the players that worked hard to get it.

What if someone genuinely didn't know about property taxes? What century are they living in?! LOL Duh, the 21st century. Look it up.

The property tax is a tax on your house. Every time you want to improve your home, you have to pay extra cash. It's like getting prizes from a game show. You have to pay cash to the government, and some people don't have that extra money. Property tax is a sin tax on more and better capital. Not to mention for property taxes, speculation causes values to fluctuate constantly. My house's value was increased at tax time and then reduced thereafter. To reduce this effect you'd have to tax every month and that'd be ridiculous.

If you tax farm land at a higher rate the cost of your food will escalate at the same rate.

Additionally, if the government subsidizes any farm based product the cost rises. Look at corn. The government in the US subsidizes the production of ethanol to be used a gasoline additive or substitute. This created more demand for corn. Add to that diesel fuel prices are as high as they've ever been and this year corn prices are at an all time high.

So let's not jack the taxes on land. I kind of like cheap tacos.

So a struggling farmer with a little 40 acre farm will pay 40 TIMES the taxes of a multi-millionaire that lives in a three story mansion on a one acre plot. Yeah, that sounds really fair.

Food has always been in demand. The price was low because of high supply. The government taxes the rich to buy the food in order to keep farmers from wasting their money and going broke.

Take it literally hrench, vertical and farming. You can't greenhouse 40 acres. THAT'S a waste of steel. I thought weeds grew in the wild. Am I mistaken?

Dwane, what I have to say to the complaining farmer doesn't sound good at all. I say he should "move to the city," as in get out of farming. He's not a good farmer if he's struggling. That's kind of the point of competition. To weed out, no pun intended, those that can't do it right; so that things are done right. And he's probably struggling because the government subsidization hasn't come in yet or at all.

Obviously when the government taxes at all, prices go up. Why not make the tax simple? A national retail tax, for instance, will make you constantly have to pay and it won't protect the environment.

"Take it literally hrench, vertical and farming. You can't greenhouse 40 acres. THAT'S a waste of steel. I thought weeds grew in the wild. Am I mistaken?"

Clarifying something:When I said take it literally, I mean there are other forms of vertical farming and they would probably need at least some chemicals. Google video vertical farming and you'll see an example of non-skyscraper vertical farming.

You seem to have missed my point by focusing too much on the word "struggling". The point was, many people that are extremely wealthy own little land while some other people of more modest means own larger pieces of land. It doesn't seem sensible to allow very wealthy people to effectively dodge paying a fair share of taxes by simply spending/investing their wealth in something other than land.

This system would force any person that owns a large piece of land to make it pay for itself. If a person owns several acres of virgin forest, they will probably feel compelled to cut it down and put something more profitable on it.

The millionaire with the three story mansion has to pay for whatever holds the mansion up. That comes from raw materials, and material producers are also taxed.

The person who lives unhealthy and eats five burgers a day is probably not doing as well as an assertive millionaire who eats a smaller, healthier meal that didn't take up as much land to make. The people who take too many materials and too much energy pay their keep, not investors who keep the capitalistic economy going and growing.

And if a person with a large piece of land has to make it pay for itself, then at least they're going to use it for a good purpose. Because to make something pay for itself, it has to be in demand. And when it's in demand, it's the people's responsibility for whatever happens. Last I saw, not only was food a good idea to me, it's also in demand because other people see it as a good idea as well. So I don't think worrying about a lack of profit from agriculture is called for. To make more profit, you just find ways of growing more food from the same parcel of land. I believe that's what we've been doing.

DaFatal, I never thought I'd be defending the property tax system (because I don't believe in any 'progressive' taxes) but I do agree that taxing property based on what it's value is likely to be is much more logical than taxing based on how large it is. An acre in NY City vs an acre in Utah?

I think the whole vertical farming thing is probably only do-able for vegetables. Do you know how much it would cost to grow a bushel of wheat in a building? As for the outdoors having weeds, you probably don't see the wheatfields and cornfields that I do. We use poisons to kill those weeds. And I don't understand how the indoor-farmer thinks he'll exclude weeds and bugs-I have to use poison to keep bugs out of my house--what's the difference with a greenhouse?

As for crop-price-supports, I don't agree with them; I'm a free-market capitalist. I think the corporate-farmers appreciate them more than the small-guy, because the family farmer doesn't want to pay a lawyer to tell him what hoops he has to jump through to get the government money. Farm people make-do when times are lean. They don't want your sympathy.

But there's no way growing food in buildings (vertical farms) can ever be even close to as cheap as growing outdoors. Those people on the videos you mention keep talking about growing more on less space with less water and 'returning eco-systems'. I'm perplexed at the need to save space and water. California stuff. Around here, if you stop farming a field, ten years later, it's returned to an eco system (forested), but fallow land doesn't do anybody any good. ?? They're talking about air conditioners, and motorized conveyors--these things waste energy. Plants don't need airconditioning. ?? Space?--a modern combine can harvest many acres an hour and it collects semi-truck-loads of grain. You can do that in a building? Doubt it. Don't forget, our 'grains' are just modified grasses. They need lots of space to grow. And here, we have water that just falls from the sky. Hard to believe.

Finally, the price of something is usually a pretty-good measure of the amount of resources it took to get it. That rich person eating a small meal may not get as many calories as a five-burger person, but the rich-meal is likely to be red snapper or something that took lots of energy to obtain.

Materials, food, energy, it's all the same. It all stems from land, sometimes literally. You mine, you chop, you farm, you drill, all this takes land, and all of it can be added to your prices. It's a lot like a national retail tax but without the fact that instead of you getting a cent (maybe going to charity), they make you pay an extra nickel above the dollar (and I don't like holding change).

All taxes increase prices because people who get taxed want to recoup the loss. The red snapper is taxed more than the burger if it took more energy to make and ship. If it didn't, well, you're just being prejudice against rich people.

Just because they have a large house doesn't mean they're eating expensive fish. The property tax is not a good measure of what kind of materials, energy, or food the owner is taking in.

You're thinking one-dimensionally. I say tax on land. You say Utah uses more land. You don't realize what Utah does. It makes money off of New York, that's what.New York eats more food than Utah. Utah doesn't have to transport as much food. New York needs the transportation of tons of food. Sounds like a balance to me. And I see your point about vertical farming, and I'll raise you too. It's the same concept as New York requiring more energy. Vertical farms will require lots of energy and materials, and that means higher taxation. Oh and people thought that a city with tall buildings was too expensive as well. But, gee wiz, it happened.

Hrench didn't say Utah "uses" more land. His point was that an acre of land in Utah (which is mostly empty desert) is nowhere near as valuable as an acre on Manhatten Island. It doesn't make sense to tax them the same when the earning potential is so different. How does an acre of Utah desert make money off of NY?

Oops. I was caught up in how people keep saying "what about the poor farmers?" I thought Utah was mostly farmland or something. I guess if it's mostly desert, then it can't be mostly farmland. I guess the government could tax less any states that have low earning potential from their land. It's not like we haven't done something similar with the income tax.