Then surely you can twist some part of the constitution to find some relevance to land value taxes as I’ve proposed them. If you can, then credit where credit’s due, you have a point worth considering. If you can’t, then your concerns seem a lot less plausible.
Also, do you concede you were wrong about the U.S. not taking on $1T of debt? Because it seems like you’re really confident about things that you shouldn’t be confident about. Like, stuff that a simple google search would disconfirm. I suspect you have a real problem admitting error. In our other conversation, you totally just Smoke Bombed without so much as a “Oh, my bad”.
Let me put it this way, I don’t think it was sarcasm.
I explicitly asked for "legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution", because that's what's actually relevant here. Then you bring up legislation that was struck down based off the 14th amendment's equal protection and due process clauses.
Have you got any examples that actually meet the specified criteria (i.e. within the last 100 years, laws that are legislation, that were struck down by the supreme court without even a tenuous reference to the constitution)? If you don't have any examples, then you need to concede that point, and then reference any places in the constitution that could, even unfairly, be used to invalidate my specific proposal (land value tax).
The type of law my proposal falls under is legislation. So you should give an example in the last 100 years where the supreme court invalidated legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution. (Roe vs Wade not being an example, because it's not legislation.)
Or concede that the supreme court hasn't overturned legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution in the last 100 years, and then point to any constitutional reason the court could give for overturning the specific policy I've advocated for (land value tax with a delay and a debt).
Your argument is too powerful. And by that, I mean it classifies all policy arguments as dumb. “Oh you want to do X? Well the whole system is screwed up, so you’re naïve for even suggesting it.” Substitute any policy that could conceivably involve the courts for X. That’s your argument. If your arguments can’t delineate between good and bad ideas, your arguments have no value.
Why should I take your legal claims more seriously than something that can pass the bar exam, when you’re unable to? If you still don’t like that source, you could have googled my claim and found that you’re incorrect:
https://www.google.com/search?q=U.S.+judges+cannot+overturn+laws+unless+they+are+unconstitutional
I appreciate it. If I do write a longer version, it won't be on here, because I have no tools to moderate the comment section.
How would the enforcement perpetuity be valued? I agree, it would not be worth $1T at the moment before default because the market would assign some probability that the legislators would follow through the land value tax. Now, the important question is, “Does that matter?” I say no, it doesn't, and my reasoning is as follows.
If you bought a $100M lottery ticket, what's it worth before the numbers come out? Basically zero. But what if the numbers come up and they match your ticket? You've won the jackpot, literally. Now what if that happens, but the lottery owners don't pay? Are you going to be okay with that? Are you going to say, “The ticket was never worth much anyway, so it doesn’t matter”? No, that's a huuuuge breach of contract! You don't just get to not pay $100M dollars and have no impact on your financial credibility. That's crazy talk. If they didn't pay, you’d be very upset, and rightfully so.
I don't think that because “It's a one-off, not a repeat lottery business” is a meaningful distinction here. The government issuing debt is a repeat business.
My actual work is at an investment fund. If I saw a government being like “Nah, we're not paying that $1T perpetuity because it's a weird security”, I am selling every regular bond of theirs that we own as fast as I reasonably can. If they can just not pay that $1T contract, what else are they capable of? I am significantly increasing my probability of them defaulting.
People like me would sell the government's regular bonds ASAP, which drops the bond's prices, thereby increasing the rate of interest that the government has to pay on new debt. The fund managers who didn't do this are having to explain to their investors why they didn't sell before the prices dropped. The government just defaulted on a major debt, and their reaction was to do nothing. That's not a good career move. Fund managers don't want to be in that position, so even if they personally don't think it's a huge risk, they know that other fund managers do, so they're forced to sell as well.
You're right, but you're not fully thinking a selfish policymaker. If I were a selfish policymaker, I would implement the land value tax regardless of what I think of it, so now the government now doesn't have to pay $1T of debt. So now I create $1T worth of new debt, and spend it on public services that will buy me more votes. Governments do not have access to infinite debt, despite what some crackpots say. (If government did have access to infinite debt, most of our problems are solved.)
I don't know if I'll respond to your next message. I'll send you a private message on where I'll be writing in future.