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AI employees don't pay taxes

alec.is

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Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#181

Post by Jordan-117 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #110
Aerolfos wrote: post #38

Apart 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…

> Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all". Except that's not how the economy works. Suppose you automate web development. Fewer people get paid for that anymore. Does it increase long-term unemployment? Not really, because it creates surplus. Now everybody else ha…

>Now everybody else has a little extra money they didn't have to spend on web development, and they'll want to buy something with it, so you get new jobs making whatever it is they want to spend the money on instead.

Why assume a business that just boosted profits by reducing headcount would want to spend that surplus on hiring more workers elsewhere? Seems like it would mostly go towards stock buybacks and higher executive pay packages. There might be some leakage into new hiring, but I reckon the overall impact will be intensifying the funneling of money to the top and further hollowing out of the labor market.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#184

Post by Yodel0914 »

toss1 wrote: post #178
Yodel0914 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I in principle agree, but it’s very hard to implement a progressive tax system if the basis is consumption (or “financial transactions”)

How not; wouldn't it be straightforward to have tax rate tables based on transaction size? E.g., transaction $1MM=0.5%, with restructuring payments to avoid taxes to carry heavy penalties. Not many poor people will be making million-dollar+ transactions, and it seems like taxing ALL transactions will help make the rich pay their fair share, as their money tends to have low velocity relative to consumer goods, but the…

When you say transactions, what are you thinking of? I was thinking of your usual VAT/GST - in that case any sort of progressive tax would be hell for small businesses (or large ones) to implement.

If you’re talking about banks taxing financial transactions, that’s something I haven’t really thought through- it would have some interesting side effects and work arounds.

I like the simplicity of a flat consumption tax combined with a UBI - I’m not sure how politically viable it is, though.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#185

Post by toss1 »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #184
toss1 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How not; wouldn't it be straightforward to have tax rate tables based on transaction size? E.g., transaction $1MM=0.5%, with restructuring payments to avoid taxes to carry heavy penalties. Not many poor people will be making million-dollar+ transactions, and it seems like taxing ALL transactions will help make the rich pay their fair share, as their money tends to have low velocity relative to consumer goods, but the…

When you say transactions, what are you thinking of? I was thinking of your usual VAT/GST - in that case any sort of progressive tax would be hell for small businesses (or large ones) to implement. If you’re talking about banks taxing financial transactions, that’s something I haven’t really thought through- it would have some interesting side effects and work arounds. I like the simplicity of a flat consumption tax…

I'm not sure how politically viable it is either — the wealthy owners of congresspeople will scream like they are being murdered.

I wasn't thinking of any kind of VAT, where you need to subtract out your cost, etc.; that is a mess! Just a straight shaving off the transaction. The idea is to spread it over so many transactions the rates are so low it isn't worth bothering to work around.

For example, if you try to structure a $1million house purchase into ten %$99,999 payments to get from 0.5% down to 0.4% rate, you will save a grand total of $1000, hardly worth it considering there should also be laws with strong penalties for such structuring.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#186

Post by laxmena »

Setting aside the tax discussion for a moment:

> In the end, the “shortcut” had cost her more time than if she’d just done the work herself from the start.

I had this same opinion on AI IDE Copilots about a year and a half ago. They were too nascent, and writing code manually saved me hours of debugging their buggy code recommendations.

Fast forward - today—IDE Copilots have grown leaps and bounds in its quality of outputs. They have real utility now.

It's important to note that - "This is the worst AI agents will ever be, it will only get better moving forward."

I'm confident these tools will keep improving and eventually create net productivity gains, including for the Excel use case you mentioned.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#187

Post by TheCleric »

websiteapi wrote: post #131
TheCleric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Means testing has its own issues. How do you decide what the lines are? How do you design it for people just outside those lines that keeps it fair? Who enforces it? What happens when your means change? Figuring all this stuff has a cost, both real (now you have to hire people to screen and enforce the means testing) and emotional/political (news story about a single mother who was rejected for making $1 too much). S…

the reality is you can't just give things to everyone. the cost is just not sustainable.

For sure. We could never have universal benefits like roads, childhood education, firefighters, etc. That would never work.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#188

Post by nerdponx »

twoodfin wrote: post #91
lovich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that every year we are capable of producing more, but we keep asking people to accept less? Like how is “we can replace all workers with AI agents” not compatible with “we can extract enough wealth from the new profitability to sustain everyone at the current rate as a service(UBI)” If we’re more productive after replacing everyone with machines then why can’t we just cover everyone’s basic(victuals/housing…

We don’t ask people to accept less, quite the opposite: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

Per capita is simply the total quantity divided by the total population and doesn't tell you anything about the distribution thereof.

Imagine a lord with an annual income of $100 from 10 serfs, who each pay $10 in annual rent to the lord but can sell goods at the nearby market town for an annual total of $11. The lord pays $80 for manor upkeep and luxuries to artisans etc from surrounding towns. That's $30 in disposable income, $2.73 per capita. One day the goods at the market and the artisans's fees all go up in price by 50% to $16.50 and $120 respectively. The lord then raises rent by 50% to $15. The lord now makes $150, so now his disposable income is $30 but all the serfs still have only $1.50 each of disposable income. The total of $40 and per capita of $4 went up, but the lord got most of the gains. And if the lord had the ability to raise rent more than the 50% increase to 15.50 (eg if serfs couldn't legally leave), then serfs would have no more disposable income at all while the total disposable income per capita would still increase.

Re: AI employees don't pay taxes

#189

Post by [deleted] »

cperciva wrote: post #98
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payroll taxes are the worst for small companies followed by strong labor law. Strong Labor laws are good if the company has 500-1000+ people but not able to fire someone within the month with reason is just dumb (I’m looking at Europe). It indeed causes many startups to hire 50% less people than they can. I honestly don’t understand taxing anyone making less than something like 500K. Don’t tax anyone earns less than…

focus all tax collection to top 1% If you do that in the USA, you're ignoring 79% of income. The top 1% earn a lot more than average but they're still small in number, and their collective income is only 21% of the total. (And the USA is uncommonly high as regards income share received by the top 1%; Canada is at 11.5% and is fairly typical.)

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