ndrosen

After my speech last week, someone asked about rich people who owned stocks instead of land. I said that I did not favor imposing high tax rates on productive businesses as opposed to the ownership of land. Also, stocks to some extent reflect the ownership of land by businesses, whether farmland, mineral land, or high value urban land. I gave the example of something I had read about, a one story McDonalds restaurant next to a subway stop in Manhattan. Some day, McDonalds might sell the land or develop it, and could reap a fortune by doing so; they were to some extent in the business of land speculation, not selling fast food.

Taxing land values more heavily would reduce the value of stock in corporations whose assets included large amounts of land.