Takeover artists and hatchetmen destroyed many thousands of jobs. Were they taxed or punished? Hell no, movies were made of them.
Just saying ....
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
21–30 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Infrastructure is not unproductive, even machines need roads. I don't think self-driving vehicles should be exempt from road tax.
Roads should be (and are in many places) paid for with fuel excise taxes only. The more you drive, the more you pay.
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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#23When I was young I imagined a future where nobody had to work because computers and robots could do it all.
Well, we’re in a future where everyone still has to work to live, but the robots are taking the jobs instead
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#24When I was young I imagined a future where nobody had to work because computers and robots could do it all.
I imagine this future could come true, if we're willing to accept that there would be many fewer people.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#25When I was young I imagined a future where nobody had to work because computers and robots could do it all.
the issues is that work, salary was also an indirect way to structure society. want more, think more / work more (or be more cunning). now what we can't use that parameter.. how do we decide
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't need taxes to pay a UBI. If "every country" is in debt, who owns the debt exactly? ... (it's not real debt)
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
I’m pretty sure the poster you’re replying to is hinting at MMT and for your own statement,
Money is a nations currency. It’s actually the people of that nations property and you only get a lease on it.
If you disagree then try to do something like ceding the land that you “own” to another nations and see how that goes
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#27"In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income"
That's the problem. AI has the same tax problems as corporations. But US corporate taxes are historically very low and easy to evade.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> productive According to the economic notion of value, which is unique among definitions of "value" in being wealth-weighted, enshrining "mega gainz in brokerage accounts" as the ultimate social good while shrugging its shoulders at the plight of the ahem low-weight individual.
Value isn’t something society measures or adds up by people’s bank balances; it’s just how much each individual personally wants something, and markets show this only through voluntary choices, not by declaring rich people’s gains more important than poor people’s lives.
If you have lots of money, you can spend lots of money. If you have no money, you can spend no money. Your demand is indeed wealth-weighted in the objective function of the market.
That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that rich people have most of the money and rich people care mostly about one thing: getting paid for being rich. That happens when assets go up.
Assets have a counterparty, so policy that pumps assets can do so by encouring genuine growth (difficult, unreliable) or by whacking the counterparty over the head (easy, reliable). Anti-consumer and anti-labor policy makes stocks go up, for example. NIMY policies make real-estate go up. Selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China makes bonds go up.
Once rich people get all of the money (US gini is 0.83, are we there yet?) the objective function of the entire system shifts away from satisfying the needs of people and towards whacking counterparties of assets over the head. It's an ugly thing to see, once you know how to see it.
> bofadeez
Your name and arguments are both young-libertarian coded so let me take a shot in the dark at a personal appeal: the reason why houses are so damn difficult for you to afford is that you are the counterparty.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Infrastructure is not unproductive, even machines need roads. I don't think self-driving vehicles should be exempt from road tax.
Roads should be (and are in many places) paid for with fuel excise taxes only. The more you drive, the more you pay.
Only if it’s not an electric car. Electric cars need to start paying somehow, too. I’m open to many options, especially including weight * miles driven or similar.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#30By this logic owners of wheel barrows should be taxed for all the manual labour jobs the wheel barrow destroyed.
Exactly. This is such a silly argument. The article takes the argument "if a lot of jobs disappeared since they are now done effectively for free, what about tax revenue??"
It really misses the forrest from the trees. You're transported into a world in which efficiencies mean that much fewer people need to work, but somehow government services and entitlements are unchanged and we need to hit roughly the same percent federal tax receipts or ... what exactly?