The paper infers the biasing effects of taxes from their differential effects on the present values of rival uses for given tracts of land. After-tax wage rates, interest rates, and commodity prices are exogenous, hence not affected by taxes, which are therefore all shifted to land rents and values. The effects are differential among rival uses, hence change their ranking in the eyes of the landownermanager. Most taxes downgrade the highest use into a lower use, inducing quantum leaps away from higher and better uses into lower and worse uses. The paper uses forestry as an allegory for all land uses. It compares yield taxes, property taxes, income taxes, and site value taxes. It finds that a change from the first three to the site value tax would induce quantum leaps from lower to higher uses of land.The method here is to infer the biasing effects of taxes from their differential effects on present values of rival uses for land. A local tax jurisdiction is an open economy. Our simplifying premise is that arbitrage equalizes all after-tax rates of return on new investing, at levels determined in world capital markets. Labor is free to come and go, and product prices are set in world markets. Given those premises, all taxes are shifted to land, the only factor fixed in an otherwise open economy; tax jurisdictions are defined as fixed areas of land.Using these premises lets us devise a simple test for tax neutrality. 1 Treat net present value derived from a land improvement as a residual, and impute this residual value to land. Find algebraically the ratio of after-tax land value to before-tax land value. If the ratio is simply (1 − t) (where t is a tax rate), the tax is neutral-the highest and best use of land after tax is the same as that before tax. 2 The ratio (1 − t)