I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth. For half a century, in France, it's been told that real estate was the safest/best investment for households; everyone was passively peer pressured each year, whatever the macroeconomic situation at the moment, to buy. This is a Ponzi scheme, so even the middle class households that recently bought their own shitty flat in Paris will never vote for such a tax because their overpriced asset would lose value and it's often their only lifelong investment.
The same fear will happen if you just target investors owning multiple real estate with this tax, or simply forbid by law from owning several flats in high demand areas. The right wing would scream that the hard working French guy won't be able to invest his hard won money, but the very rich foreigners from Saudi Arabia or investments funds from USA will find a loophole thanks to their infinite money and buy all the french real estate.
Hell, most people in my country are against inheritance tax despite a huge part of them not rich enough to pay it, meanwhile inequalities are rising because of inherited wealth. So taxing the land won't happen, the bourgeoisie has been too effective in its propaganda.
> I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth
Most places do tax real estate. I was surprised to look it up and find that Paris has some of the lowest property tax rates in the world.
Land Value Tax would be a little different, though. It's a proposal to replace most or all taxes with a simple tax on the estimated value of the land. One of the key features of LVT is that if land becomes valuable over time, the tax on that land becomes so high that the owner is forced to sell it. The idea is that the LVT ensures optimal usage of the land by forcing people who own land in valuable areas to use it for a business. So if you buy a house and the area becomes popular 10 years later, your tax bill might get so high that you have to sell it to a developer who will build a high-rise on it, or a grocery store that can afford the high tax rate.
It would never be accepted in practice when everyone's 70 year old parents were being forced to sell their modest forever homes. There's also a major problem where the structures aren't considered at all, so one person with a $2 million home living next to someone with a $200,000 100-year old home would pay the same tax rate if they're on the same size lot, because it only cares about the value of the land.
I don't know why Land Value Tax has become the default solution to everything on the internet, because I think most people would actually hate what it did to society. Having progressive taxes that scale with people's income, spending, and size of their home is good for making the tax burden proportional to wealth and consumption. Replacing it all with a tax that just taxes how much your property is worth ignores everything except the value of your land, which is completely out of your control over several decades of life as the world changes around you.