What is the world is an "AI employee"?
It's an employee that has been replaced by AI.
Maybe we should tax computers entirely
AI employees don't pay taxes
161–170 of 190 posts
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with a consumption tax is not the steady state, but the transition from the current state. How do you take a retiree couple whose main income-earning days are far behind them, and ask them to pay 25% or more on their consumption? Not an impossible problem, but it’s THE problem.
Is it though? Both social security and 401k withdrawals are taxed under the existing income tax, so they'd just be paying it as consumption tax instead. Also, aren't people with an enormous amount of stored wealth "the rich"?
You don’t have to have an enormous amount of stored wealth to be on a livable fixed income (e.g. a municipal pension) and that income could be very lightly taxed today relative to a viable consumption tax.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Disposable income” is what’s left after debt repayment and essentials like food, health care, and shelter. What did you think it meant? I can’t make sense of your reply.
Ah, and the calculation for what is “essentials” has stayed the same all this time? Does this capture if more people are renting and part of their expenditure on shelter each month is just spent vs a mortgage payment where the principal paid off gets you equity? I legitimately don’t know, but I know that single value graphs trying to summarize a complex situation are useless on their own and need more data to draw an…
I don’t know, either, but I’ve got data from the Fed, what would you suggest looking at instead?
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyhow, we know what life was like before Great Society programs, and it wasn't higher wages for the poor, we've just forgotten because it's been so successful. That doesn't tell you the answer because the programs were instituted prior to the productivity increases in the 20th century. Are people better off now than they were before the general availability of electric light or mechanized transportation? Probably,…
> People frequently have choices between jobs that are easier or otherwise more pleasant and jobs that pay more. For example, long-haul truck drivers get paid significantly more than short-haul drivers, but they also sleep in their trucks and don't get to see their families most nights. Likewise, a lot of jobs require you to get a degree or certification, which can be a lot of work, which people may not be willing to…
> There's value in choice, and that value is being reaped by the worker precisely because of poverty programs make it possible.
It seems like you're ignoring the same thing you're objecting to: It's a dynamic system.
If long-haul trucking companies offer less desirable but higher paying jobs and easier jobs aren't paying a living wage then people would pick the harder job that lets them not starve. Which means the easier jobs would have to pay more in order to attract workers, unless those workers can get government assistance. If they can, the easier jobs can get people to work without paying more, because the assistance programs let them pick the easier job even at lower pay. In other words, the subsidies were supposed to go to the poor and instead they went to the lower-paying employers.
In a dynamic system the long-haul companies would then have to respond if it became more desirable to work somewhere the pay is low enough to get government assistance, but the phase outs give the low-paying employers another advantage.
Say the undesirability of the job is good for $15k/year in additional compensation. However, if you got paid $15k more, you'd lose $10k to government benefit phase outs and additional taxes. To actually get paid $15k more, you'd have to "get paid" $45k more. Which is to say, the employer with the low-paying job can pay you $45k less.
But it's a dynamic system, so they might "only" pay you $35k less and then hire more people. The trucking companies would then have to pay $45k more than them when it used to be $15k. Even with Walmart paying less than before, their relative advantage has increased. And there are two ways to get something a long distance over land: A long-haul truck the whole way, or a short-haul truck to the rail yard, a freight train, and then another short-haul truck. So then instead of a truck driver getting higher pay per mile over 2000 miles of driving, a different one gets lower pay per mile over 60 miles of driving twice, and a rail company gets the rest.
So the low-wage subsidies cause the amount of higher-wage labor demand to go down by making it less competitive with non-labor alternatives to perform the same function, as labor is diverted to the lower-paying jobs even while enabling them to pay even less.
> There are other people for whom short-haul trucking is the less desirable choice than what they're doing now, or who work fewer hours than they're doing now.
All of that is already baked in to the existing numbers; the long-haul drivers get paid more because fewer people want to do it.
> Like perpetual motion or free energy machines, at the most miniscule scale there are exceptions and caveats, but those exceptions don't scale to a systems level.
Only they're not exceptions. If you subsidize something you get more of it. What happens if you subsidize low-paying jobs but not higher-paying jobs?
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Busted. I am a human-in-the-loop. I think everybody should use LLMs to polish their language. This topic is important to me and I want to communicate as effectively as possible. I stand by every character of the article regardless of which fancy autocomplete I used to polish it. I use spellcheck, too, and a digital tuner for my guitar. Just want to reiterate: https://alec.is/posts/ai-employees-dont-pay-taxes/#:~:text…
I personally don't like using LLMs for doing anything creative, but I find it hilarious how if you're against AI for coding you're considered a Luddite by most in these parts. But blog posts? Now that's too far and you deserve to be lambasted. I don't see anything wrong with what you've done.
LLMs are worse at things where performance is based on subjective preference, it's as simple as that.
It's not just blog posts: the staunchest AI supporters are the quickest to call out slop in the default aesthetics of vibe-coded websites, or images, or music.
Pretty much anywhere that "taste" is supposed to be involved.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#166Apart from being all AI-written: > Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social safety net (or UBI) required to keep the displaced alive, the math breaks. The argument being given simply avoids the question of where the economy itself is in all this. The workers pay taxes, the taxes pay for infrastructure, sure. But the workers aren't doing…
> It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. I disagree with your assertion. Efficiency, production improvements are exactly what many companies are going for. We already have a huge deficit of software that needs to be written that cannot be written with the current Human programming resources available. We have plenty of things, infrastructure…
100% this. I run a software company and we never run out of new things to build. Our issue is velocity, we would be foolish to lay off employees, rather we must use AI to build things 50% faster if we can. What AI will do is further level the playing field in software, just like tractors allowed farms to expand in size.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it though? Both social security and 401k withdrawals are taxed under the existing income tax, so they'd just be paying it as consumption tax instead. Also, aren't people with an enormous amount of stored wealth "the rich"?
You don’t have to have an enormous amount of stored wealth to be on a livable fixed income (e.g. a municipal pension) and that income could be very lightly taxed today relative to a viable consumption tax.
Government pensions seem like the easy one. The state would be getting the revenue from when they spend the money, so they could use it to adjust the amount of the pension ("cost of living adjustment") and it would be revenue-neutral.
But also, government pensions tend to be, shall we say, unreasonably generous, because they live in that sour spot between "the legislature doesn't have to pay for this in the current year's budget" and "the union negotiates reasonable-seeming rules it knows it can game against public officials who are in their pocket or DGAF" e.g. pension is based on compensation in the last year before retirement and overtime is "awarded" based on seniority, so that people put in 80 hours of overtime every week in their last year. And then we're back to, aren't those the people we want to be taxing anyway?
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, and the calculation for what is “essentials” has stayed the same all this time? Does this capture if more people are renting and part of their expenditure on shelter each month is just spent vs a mortgage payment where the principal paid off gets you equity? I legitimately don’t know, but I know that single value graphs trying to summarize a complex situation are useless on their own and need more data to draw an…
I don’t know, either, but I’ve got data from the Fed, what would you suggest looking at instead?
> Chart that against education and training costs(not just college, let’s include things like trade school or mechanics needing to supply their own tools) and basics like housing.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#169I stopped reading when this idiot declared that a tool that makes problems worse instead of helping is evidence of a system working as it should.
This is reasoning as cockeyed as the pigs use in Animal Farm.
Re: AI employees don't pay taxes
#170Apart from being all AI-written: > Reality: It’s not fear; it’s math. If 30% of the workforce is displaced, and the remaining 70% have to pay for the social safety net (or UBI) required to keep the displaced alive, the math breaks. The argument being given simply avoids the question of where the economy itself is in all this. The workers pay taxes, the taxes pay for infrastructure, sure. But the workers aren't doing…
> Apart from being all AI-written I think nearly 100% of blog posts are run through an LLM now. The author was lazy and went with the default LLM "tone" and so the typical LLM grammar usage and turns of phrase are too readily apparent. It's really disheartening as I read blogs to get a perspective on what another human thinks and how their thought process works. If I wanted to chat with a LLM, I can open a new tab.
I never use an LLM for blog posts. Seemed like you need to hear more people telling you that.
Only amateurs and scammers use LLMs for writing.