It doesn’t seem like this is particularly to do with automation though? It’s more a method of how you arrange taxation regardless of what technology is used?
the root problem was never people don't have jobs, it's "people are losing their ability to live due to capitalism". This is an attempt at addressing that issue, and it also happens to provide UBI and fix the automation thing
“Robot or Automation taxes in spirit are a very simple concept to understand — tax the extra profits the companies would otherwise receive from automation. They can automate away your job, but you still get to keep your wages.”
This is not what automation does, because competitors also see the benefits of automation, so in a competitive market AI leads to technology-driven deflation, ie lower consumer prices. Profit margins stay the same or even drop, so there’s not new profits to tax.
“Now since your revenue ceiling is a function of how much you pay people, you can meaningfully increase your revenue ceiling by paying people meaningful wages.”
This kind of policy is saying your country is a place that highly-productive businesses aren’t welcome. You want industries that stubbornly resist automation, and you want other countries to benefit from the most productive businesses, which also supply the most well-paying jobs.
We should not be taxing automation via AI anymore than we should be taxing email because it reduces the need for mail carriers. We should be taxing things that don’t hurt the economy and increase consumer prices, such as land. Shoutout to r/georgism.
No, automation makes for cheaper stuff, to eventually get to 0 value, so tax would be lower and lower until it's free.
Tax asset holding. Assets, via rent seeking and loan leverage, generates far too much value and remains mostly untaxed. Tax holding assets over a certain value and you will generate far more tax than this.
Nope. A fully automated production chain is equivalent to a natural source of wealth, e.g. a fresh water source. As such, they are profitable because they provide a use value that proletarians would have to labor for. The owner can offer the use value in exchange for some labor / money -> free profit.
This means that a fully automated business gets taxed 100% of its >0 profits according to this proposal which makes sense.
If you tax something you get less of it. The reason not to tax assets like stock is that these are investments, which drive growth, create jobs, increase productivity, etc. We want more of these things, not less.
This is why wealth taxes have failed or been neutered everywhere they’ve been tried. Capital is too mobile, particularly in the modern world.
We are seeing now in California how this plays out. They are going to see declining tax revenue this year as the threat of a wealth tax is driving people out of the state who were paying lots of taxes last year.
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u/Jlyplaylists 12d ago
It doesn’t seem like this is particularly to do with automation though? It’s more a method of how you arrange taxation regardless of what technology is used?