Then surely you can twist some part of the constitution to find some relevance to land value taxes as I’ve proposed them.
It’s not hard. “Reducing the value of the land is illegal as an uncompensated taking” or “this tax is unconstitutional because it violates the rule about direct taxes” (twisting the definition of direct tax so they can include it, of course) or even just due process because if the tax is instituted, the owner has no way to contest it.
You could say “those arguments are obviously wrong, so they don’t count”. You could say “they don’t apply those arguments in other situations—that’s special pleading and sophistry”. But it doesn’t matter how good or bad the Constitutional arguments are, only that a court would make them. And of course from our point of view 50 years in the past, they are obviously bad arguments to everyone, but 50 years in the past, Constitutional arguments about gay marriage were obviously bad too.
Also, do you concede you were wrong about the U.S. not taking on $1T of debt?
No. The national debt is 33T total, so 1T is a substantial portion of it. Nothing like that can, in practice, be put into place without a complete political realignment.
I’ll leave it to others to decide how plausible it is that the courts would make those arguments (especially when the post explicitly handles compensation). And it looks like I called it with your complete inability to accept error. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
It’s not hard. “Reducing the value of the land is illegal as an uncompensated taking” or “this tax is unconstitutional because it violates the rule about direct taxes” (twisting the definition of direct tax so they can include it, of course) or even just due process because if the tax is instituted, the owner has no way to contest it.
You could say “those arguments are obviously wrong, so they don’t count”. You could say “they don’t apply those arguments in other situations—that’s special pleading and sophistry”. But it doesn’t matter how good or bad the Constitutional arguments are, only that a court would make them. And of course from our point of view 50 years in the past, they are obviously bad arguments to everyone, but 50 years in the past, Constitutional arguments about gay marriage were obviously bad too.
No. The national debt is 33T total, so 1T is a substantial portion of it. Nothing like that can, in practice, be put into place without a complete political realignment.
I’ll leave it to others to decide how plausible it is that the courts would make those arguments (especially when the post explicitly handles compensation). And it looks like I called it with your complete inability to accept error. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.