Land value tax in the context of "Progressive tax"

Poverty reduction, poverty relief, or poverty alleviation is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty. Measures, like those promoted by Henry George in his economics classic Progress and Poverty, are those that raise, or are intended to raise, ways of enabling the poor to create wealth for themselves as a conduit of ending poverty forever. In modern times, various economists within the Georgism movement propose measures like the land value tax to enhance access to the natural world for all.

Poverty occurs in both developing countries and developed countries. While poverty is much more widespread in developing countries, both types of countries undertake poverty reduction measures.

Georgism, in modern times also called Geoism, and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that persons should own the value that they produce themselves, while the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems based on principles of land rights and public finance that attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.

Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by land ownership, natural monopolies, pollution rights, and control of the commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource that is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of land monopoly involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a land value tax (LVT), the revenues from which can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (such as on income, trade, or purchases) that are posited to be unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend.

A single tax is a system of taxation based mainly or exclusively on one tax, typically chosen for its special properties, often being a tax on land value.

Pierre Le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert and Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban were early advocates for a single tax, but, rejecting the claim that land has certain economic properties which make it uniquely suitable for taxation, they instead proposed a flat tax on all incomes.

Hylton v. United States, 3 U.S. (3 Dall.) 171 (1796), is an early United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a yearly tax on carriages did not violate the Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 and Article I, Section 9, Clause 4 requirements for the apportioning of direct taxes. The Court concluded that the carriage tax was not a direct tax, which would require apportionment among the states. The Court noted that a tax on land was an example of a direct tax that was contemplated by the Constitution.

The case is also significant for being the first case by the Supreme Court to rely on judicial review, later formally established by Marbury v. Madison (1803), to decide whether a statute of Congress was unconstitutional.