As it happens, taxing land assessments rather than other things, such as buildings, income, sales, payroll, etc. is very much in agreement with the ability-to-pay thesis. Here are five reasons why: 

1) Land values are very unequally distributed. The income of most people comes mainly from everything but land values (isn't that true for you?). They would save on taxes if taxes were shifted from income, purchases, buildings, etc. to land values. For instance, poor people would be big winners because they don't own valuable land (if they did, they wouldn't be poor). 

All renters would eventually receive big rent reductions because much less building tax would be passed on to them and because and the land tax never is.  In large cities, this is most people.  

Because land values are more concentrated than is general income, a tax on land values is even more based on ability-to-pay than is the income tax (which is the most ability-to-pay tax we have, although it is about 40% of U.S. governmental revenue).

Many empirical studies support the view that the land value tax is more in accord with ability-to-pay than any other tax. 

For example, in 1979, a study by Anthony Pileggi, then a student at Indiana University of Pa. (but now a lawyer in Columbia, Md.), found that 1.5% of the biggest landowners in Indiana, Pa., a town of 15,001 population, paid 53.5% of the property tax on land values, but in that year the top 3% of income earners in the U.S. paid 30.6% of the federal income tax.

In towns larger than Indiana, Pa., land assessment taxation is even more likely to be an ability-to-pay tax because the ownership of land value is so concentrated. 

There are a number of other studies that also conclude that land- assessment taxation is an ability-to-pay tax. For instance, President Lyndon Johnson's Commission on Urban Housing found that "the share of land in housing values tends to rise with value of house and lot together" (p. 351). 

Decrepit buildings on near-downtown land - i.e., slums - would tend to pay more with land value taxation.  But a land value tax would get rid of slums and down-tax poor people. 

2) If a land assessment tax was accompanied by abatements, exemptions, discounts, rebates, deferrals, and five other alleviations we can tell you about, it could be even more in accord with ability-to-pay. 

3) Taxes on human-produced goods and services always increase prices for all consumers and particularly hurt poor people because such taxes reduce the supply of those goods and services.  They make poverty more expensive. 

That isn't true for a tax on land values - it cannot in the long run be passed on as higher prices to poor people (and others) because the supply of land is fixed and a tax can't reduce its supply (read any basic economics textbook on this for a detailed explanation). 

4) By requiring all land-sites to be used efficiently, jobs and opportunity would be increased, to the great benefit of the unemployed. 

5) Poorer people are often tenants, and as such they will be greatly benefited from land value taxation. Their rents will be lower because there'll be less building tax passed on to them in the long run. The land assessment tax will increase, but they don't pay that tax and it is never passed on to tenants. 

The gradual introduction of land value taxation would give enough time to the few property owners who would pay more to adjust to the new tax incentives. They deserve this consideration, even though they are engaged in anti-social land-withholding that hurts the community.  As it happens, they generally have a higher-than-average income and net worth.

* 

Here are some miscellaneous but relevant considerations: 

1) All taxes can raise revenue for the government, but the impact of a land assessment tax is always exactly opposite the impact of any other tax. For instance, a land assessment tax cannot increase prices whereas all other taxes do. That's because land is fixed in supply whereas human effort is not.  

2) Practicality absolutely requires the private ownership of land.  So of course land titles remain privately held, but let the government collect the rental income of land.  Then the private ownership of land needn't be violated via tax penalties on its development. Nor would the sacred right of private property in labor and capital be violated by taxation. 

3) Some theorists are concerned about the rights of the original settlers.  But they only settled on part of what belonged equally to everyone (God's earthly gift to each of us) including succeeding generations.  No doubt the original settlers had a legal right to the land they settled on, but they shouldn't be allowed to deny the moral rights of succeeding generations. 

In any case, they didn't put their labor into the land, but onto it.  Some of them even may have put their labor into a crop on the land; speculators didn't even do that much.  No one made the land that they can legitimately claim it as their own.   

The law is supremely practical when it recognizes their legal claim to ownership, and that of their heirs and assigns. But the land assessment tax does not deny any landowner the legal right of ownership, and in fact down-taxes the uses to which that legal right can be put.

4) Conclusion: Why then own land if you have to pay a tax on its potential annual rental income? So you can put a development on it (not unimportant: that development would be less taxed).

*

Be sure to ask for the report containing summaries of each of 237 empirical studies of localities that have already adopted this tax (cost $12), or ask for the briefer report (free, no obligation) containing summaries of each of only 22 of these empirical studies.