Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
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Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
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Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#2He wanted a pay-to-view internet super-highway too. Only the consumers decided and favored the open WWW instead of his The Microsoft Network (as can be found preinstalled in Win95) - He had to rewrite his The Road Ahead 1995 book after 6 months, as WWW won. (first edition is hardcover, second edition is paperback)
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#3good idea
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#4Bill Gates is a super smart guy, so I'll assume there's an argument I've missed, but how does this make any sense? If automating factory jobs "frees up labor" (as he says) to become teachers and healthcare workers, wouldn't the income tax from the new teachers and healthcare workers just replace the lost tax from the factory workers?
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#5Bill Gates is a super smart guy, so I'll assume there's an argument I've missed, but how does this make any sense? If automating factory jobs "frees up labor" (as he says) to become teachers and healthcare workers, wouldn't the income tax from the new teachers and healthcare workers just replace the lost tax from the factory workers?
Teachers and healthcare works need to be paid in the first place. How would this be funded?
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#6Bill Gates is a super smart guy, so I'll assume there's an argument I've missed, but how does this make any sense? If automating factory jobs "frees up labor" (as he says) to become teachers and healthcare workers, wouldn't the income tax from the new teachers and healthcare workers just replace the lost tax from the factory workers?
Have you seen how much teachers get paid? Anyway, much of teacher's salaries come from taxes..
How will healthcare workers get paid when nobody has a job? That's a bit hyperbolic, but he is arguing against the consolidation of wealth from automation starving our ability to fund social services as even current levels.
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#7Bill Gates is a super smart guy, so I'll assume there's an argument I've missed, but how does this make any sense? If automating factory jobs "frees up labor" (as he says) to become teachers and healthcare workers, wouldn't the income tax from the new teachers and healthcare workers just replace the lost tax from the factory workers?
I think he is saying that in order to pay the salaries for those new jobs, taxing robots as if they were employees might be fruitful. As in, there's not enough economic demand for those roles at the moment, and in a future where there is a true surplus of human labor due to automation, it might make sense to design a tax scheme that mitigates the issue of wealth concentration in robot owners.
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#8He wanted a pay-to-view internet super-highway too. Only the consumers decided and favored the open WWW instead of his The Microsoft Network (as can be found preinstalled in Win95) - He had to rewrite his The Road Ahead 1995 book after 6 months, as WWW won. (first edition is hardcover, second edition is paperback)
That piqued my curiosity - didn't know that.
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#9Bill Gates is a super smart guy, so I'll assume there's an argument I've missed, but how does this make any sense? If automating factory jobs "frees up labor" (as he says) to become teachers and healthcare workers, wouldn't the income tax from the new teachers and healthcare workers just replace the lost tax from the factory workers?
Teachers and healthcare works need to be paid in the first place. How would this be funded?
Teachers still pay income tax. It may be true that the amount of money the government pays out increased, but the amount of income tax didn't go down.
Regardless, I took his argument to be about a more general shift to service work rather than about teachers specificlly.
Re: Bill Gates Wants to Tax Robots
#10Bill Gates is a super smart guy, so I'll assume there's an argument I've missed, but how does this make any sense? If automating factory jobs "frees up labor" (as he says) to become teachers and healthcare workers, wouldn't the income tax from the new teachers and healthcare workers just replace the lost tax from the factory workers?
Teachers and healthcare works need to be paid in the first place. How would this be funded?
By a land value tax. Taxing robots is a bad idea. Who decides how big, how small, how productive or how inefficient a robot should be? Pretty much any robot tax you can think of will skew the robot market and the distortions could be very bad for productivity. Land value taxes are nice and out of the way. They don't tell people how to run their lives. They merely tax people on an egregious form of unearned wealth.