To Fight Inequality, Tax Land
In the lasting debate over Thomas Piketty’s book on outsized returns on capital, a significant fact has been obscured: If you exclude land and housing, capital has not risen as a share of the U.S. economy. If you're surprised, you're not the only one. Intuition suggests this capital-output ratio should be higher today than it was in the early 1900s. Yet, in the U.S., capital excluding land and housing has been roughly constant as a share of the economy since the mid-1950s, and is lower today than at the turn of the 20th century.
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