Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots

Why?

In the long-term disruptions and changes in jobs are part of the changes in the world. These people are unemployed temporarily and will lose some wages in the short-term but in the long term they will benefit from technological changes.

Taxing innovation is bad. If you want to achieve social welfare goals why not use NIT (negative income tax) or less preferably, UBI (universal basic income)?

Why should people using robots pay for it rather than everybody? After all, many people (in the long-term, everybody) indirectly benefit from the usage of robots. It's a net economic win.

This is a really stupid idea, here's why (and this is not my opinion, this is how GAAP accounting works):

1. businesses already pay tax on their profits (if robots increase profits, that's increased taxes paid), and

2. owners of businesses pay income tax again (at a higher rate than workers, but deferred) on those same profits when they are extracted from the business (as higher salaries, dividends, capital gains, etc.)

3. if a business hires a worker and pays the worker, that money gets subtracted from the profit because it is a cost, a business expense so that subtracts from the tax the business pays and it subtracts from the income the owner of the business pays tax on.

4. instead, that labor money has taxes extracted from it when it is paid to the worker.

See? Taxing robots is nonsense.

So, you could make an argument that tax rates should go up or down, be progressive, flat, capital gains, etc. etc., but ... but ... what do you all think Congress does all the time anyway? This is the fiscal side of the Red State Blue State tug of war. What that tug of war does not need is more ill informed ideas.

(It's OK you don't know this, PP, I didn't know it before I learned it, but BG does not get a free pass...)

Bill Gates is pretty much retarded: kids, he didn't graduate from college and it shows; stay in school. I'll give $100 to anybody who can send me a link to something smart and non obvious that Bill Gates has ever said.

We've banned this account for trolling.

Please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts; we ban those. HN is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13666377 and marked it off-topic.

> and new jobs will be created just like they always have been.

I highly doubt that new jobs will be created when the trend is to automate them.

And we still have the problem with the people unemployed by the automation, what we should do for them?

hogwash. people should not be allowed to call ideas smart if the ideas can't be labelled the opposite way too.

I make positive contributions, I add intellectual material. I just explained how accounting works, did you understand it before I explained it? Where is your contribution to that effect?

I believe contributions should stand on their own, I don't need a reputation to support my contributions, they are that good, but my editorial voice is always the same, I'm not hiding behind different points of view: I'm not trolling.

If you don't like my contributions, no skin of my nose, I won't make them, just say so, instead of being a prig.

Bill Gates actually is a very weak intellectual who coasts on a reputation he doesn't deserve. As such, by giving bad advice, he harms the economy.