This gap in data is a bugbear for cycling/walking advocates such as myself who feel that non-vehicles do an unseen and unfair portion of the work of preventing crashes which might otherwise involve them. That they basically paper over a myriad of bad driver behaviours and ghastly infrastructure designs by always being on high alert and generally getting really good at "jumping out of the way." You can partly tell how effective this system is because when there are pedestrians killed, commentators express regret that the victim didn't just jump out of the way like a normal pedestrian, or imply that it was their fault for other reasons such as wearing the wrong clothing, looking at their device, or choosing an inappropriate time of day to go for a walk. All of this leads to attitude among drivers and politicians that current solutions are fine because the only numbers they have are literally deaths.
Anyway, one would think with SDVs that there'd be an explosion in data for this kind of thing, since the cars will witness and participate in many more close calls than could ever be reported or tracked by anyone, much less the police. I wonder how much Google is able to process their car data for these kinds of things? Potentially it could be a huge aid, not even just for law enforcement, but also for urban planners looking for the close call hotspots.
Why is that relevant to my point? How can they do all crashes without knowing the specifics of each crash?
"This research was made possible because of the thorough crash reports the Chandler Police Department and Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) prepare following fatal crashes, and we’re grateful to ADOT, Chandler Police Department, and Arizona Department of Public Safety for making these reports available to the public upon request."
At least where I'm from, poor people typically don't own land. They rent. I guess the argument can be made that the landlords would put the rent up to compensate.
I've heard this claim before, but have never seen it supported. Anecdotally, across decades of experience, it's typically not the poorest people I know who own much land, if any at all. Where they do, they own only a little, rather than a lot. Can you speak to your evidence for your claim?
For most middle class families the most expensive asset they own is their house. Do you really need evidence of that? It should be pretty self evident.
Classically [0], land taxes aren't on the value of the house, but of the land underneath. But, let's say that both the house and the land underneath get taxed, as is currently done. As a middle class homeowner, my total property tax bill is a small fraction of my income tax bill.
Let's say the US collects 6 Trillion/ year in all taxes [I'm probably off by some percent, but not too much for an internet comment.] Let's say there are about 1.5 Billion acres of taxable land in the US (Reverse engineered from "The federal government owns about 640 million acres of land in the United States, about 28% of the total land area of 2.27 billion acres." [1]) That works out to $4000/acre. For my ~sixth of an acre lot, my Federal tax bill would be about $700. That works out to be less than what I pay in income tax, so it looks like a deal to me.
It doesn't, I was replying to the comment that assumes that a property tax wouldn't hurt the poor because middle class is infinitely closer to being poor than they are being rich and this type of tax would hurt those people the most thereby causing them to fall into poverty.
For the 30% of Americans who rent it's not any of their net worth. But I agree it's weird to pick real estate as the only asset class. Introduce a progressive wealth tax and eliminate capital gains taxes in favor of taxing all income at one rate.
Land tax is one of those things that you can value easily and collect on easily. It also hurts people who just sit on land, waiting for the value to go up. It also stops negative gearing which drives up housing prices (see Australia)
I think taxing wealth is harder and then defining it is hard (how do you value illiquid shares, options, etc).
You can also have an exemption for the first $1m so that family homes are excluded from the tax.
I think a straight wealth tax should be the next step, because you will need to figure out how to stop people dodging it. Taxing someone who has a ton of debt and wealth might lead to issues.
How often outside a few cities in the world are people just sitting on land? How is the land valued? Where I live there’s an appraisal board to value land - they’re terrible at it and need investigations have shown their friends get lower appraisals.
