zlacker

The whole proposal is economically illiterate.

If billboards have negative externalities, then tax those; don't ban them.

>>eru+(OP)
How do you place a value on aesthetics? Or driver distraction? Or the irritation I feel when I see 50 billboards for cannabis every time I drive down the road near my house?

>>eru+(OP)
What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?

>>ccleve+u
It's not harder than placing values on human lives, yet we manage to do so just fine for cost-benefit analysis of eg road safety.

>>MyOutf+s2
Eh, if company wants to contribute a billion bucks to city coffers in order to put up a single billboard, that's surely worth the small amount of inconvenience.

So I hope we established that there is a finite tax that's large enough to cover the negative externalities.

Now we just need to figure out what finite amount of taxation is reasonable.

> What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?

Different municipalities (and their voters) can differ in how much they value money vs aesthetics. There's no one size fits all solution.