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If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#621

Post by mannanj »

harperlee wrote: post #187
doener wrote: post #184

No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.

100% agree! I find quite concerning that this point is not immediate in any conversation about AI or robots impacting the number of jobs, and the subsequent conversation about innovating new taxes. AI and robots are capital as any other automation on a factory, and capital gains should be taxed appropriately. This is not a new thing completely separate from the untouchable status quo wrt existing taxes. If it tickles…

its not in the convo because these capital high intensities are the ones lobbying and owning the politicians. they're each other friends. taxes were always intended even in this country to be a thing applied to serfdom: we weren't in reality immune from the conditions we aimed to flee from Great Britain where kings and queens gained qualified immunity and sovereign status - sometimes it seems like are just a "free" slave nation.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#622

Post by almosthere »

I don't get the fetish of making people (or things) pay taxes more and more.

The government wants us to focus on who should pay more taxes, but I think we owe it to ourselves to spend 600 comments on HOW OUR FUCKING TAXES SHOULD BE SPENT!

Great so now AI will give the government 800 million dollars per year to do what, build non-existent homeless shelters in LA?

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#623

Post by com2kid »

seneca wrote: post #508
immibis wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not productivity itself; it's the decoupling of productivity from wages. If I'm creating 3 times as much value as my equivalent in 1970, why aren't I getting paid 3 times as much inflation-adjusted money, hmm? It's not even unfair to shareholders - they'd also get 3 times as much as in 1970. But instead they get 10 times as much and I get 0.7 times as much, or something like that. What's the deal?

> If I'm creating 3 times as much value as my equivalent in 1970, why aren't I getting paid 3 times as much inflation-adjusted money, hmm? Because that increase in productivity comes almost entirely from technology owned by your employer. To look at it in a contrived example, let's take textiles. There is a textile factory employing weavers who weave fabric by hand, and the factory owners buys a new automated weaving…

Except in technology where the gains come from my personal investment in skills. I'm spending hours every week keeping up with the field of software engineering. I've been investing in learning my craft since I was 14 or so.

I'd argue the same goes for many types of digital creators, artists, video editors, animators, and so forth.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#624

Post by Pet_Ant »

triceratops wrote: post #547
thunky wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where's my royalty check? I support the idea of UBI with zero conditions, but not this. You didn't get royalties before AI when someone was heavily influenced by your work/content and converted that into money. If you expected compensation, then you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

The work was given to other humans . They paid taxes.

> The work was given to other humans. They paid taxes.

Says who? I mean what if black artists said they gave blues to black people, and white people making rock'n'roll? Black people spent money in black communities, now it's white people making it and spending it in theirs.

In essence they are the same point about outflows of value from the originating community. How you define a community, and what is integral is subjective.

I'm not convinced either way, but this line of reasoning feels dangerous.

I'd rather say that all ownership is communal, and as a community we allow people to retain some value to enable and encourage them further.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#625

Post by WillAdams »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #47
WillAdams wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with socialism, is eventually, one runs out of other people's money. For an example of what unlimited borrowing and money printing results in, look up Germany in 1921--1923

We're 45 years into the trickle-down experiment and we can now tell if what trickled down was gold or piss. (It was piss.)

Yeah, when folks say they want to go back to the '50s, I immediately ask, "Bring back the 90% tax bracket? Yes, please."

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#626

Post by kiba »

mike_hearn wrote: post #528
airstrike wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your argument were true we should set taxes on capital to zero, which is quite obviously a bad idea.

No, that's been a common proposal from economists pretty much since people started examining how economies work. Some places do have a capital gains tax of zero. Switzerland is one of them, and Switzerland is economically more successful than the rest of Europe. Tax is one of those issues where there are actually correct and incorrect answers, thanks to many hundreds of years of active experimentation and relatively…

An ideal LVT would tax the full economic rent of the land, but that's unlikely to happen. We don't want to overshoot 100% because that would cause land abandonment.

So in theory, LVT could collect more tax than the state needs to fund services. If that happen, it would be distributed as a Citizen's Dividend.

I am skeptical that we wouldn't be able to find a productive use for government spending, but that's a discussion for citizens of a Georgist state to have.

Also, Georgist policies would discourage the existence billionaires and other people with extreme wealth simply because a lot of their wealth came out of economic rent.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#627

Post by smallmancontrov »

Treegarden wrote: post #336
harperlee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree! I find quite concerning that this point is not immediate in any conversation about AI or robots impacting the number of jobs, and the subsequent conversation about innovating new taxes. AI and robots are capital as any other automation on a factory, and capital gains should be taxed appropriately. This is not a new thing completely separate from the untouchable status quo wrt existing taxes. If it tickles…

This is not an easy question. It seemingly boils down to: what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state? However, the root questions are: what should the state provide, how much, and of what nature? A secondary question then becomes how important the redistributive aspect is. That’s what you’re seemingly alluding to when you say: people work, get taxed on it, but others automate…

> extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state

This is extremely aggressive framing. It smashes together two wildly different kinds of citizen with wildly different, often opposing incentives and access to power: those who sell their labor for a living and those who literally own the economy. It poses them both in opposition to the government which has 1/5th the revenue of the latter.

If capital is the big bad, this framing is a mind-virus that makes the problem hard to think about and speak about.

> friction

Friction plays a key role in "the unreasonable effectiveness of capitalism." It's a big part of the reason why we can rig the game in favor of capital and not simply have the economy immediately degenerate into "capital rules, labor drools" due to the exponentials inherent in "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are."

Removing friction is not necessarily a net good if it contributes more to distributional problems than it relieves in deadweight loss. Nobody is a fan of deadweight loss, but I'd be a lot more sanguine about eliminating it if I thought we had a credible handle on the distributional problems. But we don't.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#628

Post by triceratops »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #624
triceratops wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work was given to other humans . They paid taxes.

> The work was given to other humans. They paid taxes. Says who? I mean what if black artists said they gave blues to black people, and white people making rock'n'roll? Black people spent money in black communities, now it's white people making it and spending it in theirs. In essence they are the same point about outflows of value from the originating community. How you define a community, and what is integral is su…

Still humans giving to humans. "White rock n roll artists" in your example paid taxes and those taxes benefited everyone.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#629

Post by talentedcoin »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #601
JKCalhoun wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suspicious of UBI as well. I guess I don't believe it brings about the best in human nature—nor does Capitalism in many regards.

Trials show that UBI is fantastic and does bring the best in people, lifting them from poverty and addiction, making them happier, healthier and better educated. It is awful for the extractive economy as employees are no longer desperate. Here’s a discussion with a historian who has done a lot of research on the topic https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8de9u2/i_am_a_histori...

This is not true. Don't ask a historian, ask an economist:

https://knowledge.insead.edu/economics-finance/universal-bas...

With some exceptions, UBI generally doesn't seem to work.

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