The UBI I support comes from a land value tax. Basically every citizen has an equal share of the land of the country, and rents it out to people who want to use it. If you use more than your fair share you pay in, if you use less you get paid.
Ireland has a stunningly regressive tax regime with respect to property - property taxes are a rounding error away from zero. In effect, renters pay (through income taxes) for local infrastructure and amenity improvements that benefit homeowners and increase home values, and none of that resultant increase in home value is captured in taxes.
Well, the property tax that I pay on the house that I own in Dublin is decidedly not "a rounding error away from zero". It has also recently increased, in line with the increased value of properties in the locality.
Regarding your second assertion, the construction of local amenities is in fact often paid for by the property tax. And in any case, what has actually driven the strong increase in the prices of houses nationwide is their relative scarcity now that the population has swelled so dramatically.
I think it's not a specific parcel of land, but rather, the total land tax gets divided by the number of people, and everyone gets that much of a refund. So if you own land that costs an average amount of tax, you're paying net zero. If you own land that costs more than an average amount of tax, you're a net payer. If you own land that costs a less than average amount of tax, you're a net recipient.
The other thing that usually goes with this proposal is that there would be no land costs other than tax. Land allocation would be like this: Everyone would bid how much they want to pay for the land; the winning bidder pays that much into the tax pool, and gets to use the land. The details of this idea wildly vary depending on who you ask - it's an extremely difficult problem to figure out what exact rules would work well to stop, e.g. Elon Musk outbidding some elderly lady's family farm just because he hates her (yet still balancing that with the need to stop her heirs from blocking development in that area forever). Maybe it necessitates human judgement in such cases. That's getting into the weeds though. You can see how that general kind of system would work, from a bird's eye view.
This sounds very interesting and fair. How does it address the needs of the people who create value. For example some one who might invent a transistor equivalent ? or even someone who wants to work on something that might eventually produce a social good like a new antibiotic. And how do we evaluate the resources going into that vs lets say build a Eiffel tower
Yes. It's also straightforward to extend to things which are also about use of a common resource, such as taxes related to pollution (airline seat taxes, etc.) Non-transferable shared ownership is useful and right for many things.
Why complicate things? Existing taxes are the ones which it would be sensible to start with, and existing taxes on things which we can't easily make more of (land, air, water etc.) are the sensible things to start with of those again.
Skilled labor is not currently taxed as a specific thing, and we can make more of it by educating people, so why on earth bring that up unless it's a setup for some odd rhetorical point?
