That would be a window tax.
If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The current interest on our national debt is greater than our military spending. For quite some time, my mortgage interest was larger than my principal. That didn’t make it fiscally irresponsible.
Economists currently cannot find a solution, even with computer assistance, to our economy. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/07/14/how-our-debt-cr...
It's crazy how in 1992 the US federal deficit was 4% of GDP
During Clintons term this turned around to being a 2.3% surplus in 2000. Just 25 years ago the US was spending less than it was taking in tax.
The Bush came in and that surplus became a 3.3% deficit by 2003, and then the GFC crashed it to 9.8%.
While Obama was in, it crawled back from 9.8% deficit to 3.1% by 2016 - same value as before the GFC
Since then it's gone back to 6% of GDP
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#313If AI doesn't replace workers, should workers that use software to be more productive pay more tax for using a smarter software?
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very well put. I am working on tooling that will likely increase developer productivity by a large factor; and will most likely be used to lay off more developers as their labor is no longer required. I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances. It’s the fact that all the gains are be…
If your tooling gains attention, will you take seed money from rich VCs? When the product succeeds and you get offers to exit, would you sell to the uber-wealthy? They will exploit your user's data and collect the gains. Those are the questions you should be honestly asking yourself when considering your own ethics. What's your price?
Im not owning the product. I’m getting a wage (and some stocks, so I guess I own .0000001% of it or so).
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top 1% already pays more than 40% of all federal income tax at a 26.09% effective rate. The bottom 50% has an effective rate of 3.7% and contributes only 3% of all tax revenues. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?
I did a bit of mild googling. 1% of Americans control 30% of the wealth of the nation, and apparently 12% of property. It's more than reasonable that people with that much wealth to their name pay the vast majority of the taxes, as it used to be. From a nation building perspective, there's no reason to allow a couple hundred people to wield 52,000,000,000,000$ worth of assets. It means the economy has gotten far too…
1% of Americans would be over 3 million people, not a couple hundred.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#316Why not just tax wealth at steeply progressive rates? If the robots result in increased wealth inequality, a wealth tax will counteract that. If not, then it means the introduction of robots led to more broadly-based benefits. Either way, I'm so sick and tired of people talking about the effect on GDP. GDP is a terrible way to measure anything remotely meaningful. GDP has gone up and up and things have gotten worse a…
I support the concept of taxing wealth, but I've yet to find a good way to implement it. The two biggest issues are that wealth is easily moved to places where it can't be taxed, and those making the tax decisions are easily influenced by those with wealth.
Wealth moves in lots of ways. Yes, as has been pointed out, we over value stock assets. When you own a significant percentage of a company, you can't just sell that ownership at the last trading price (the stock price would quickly crash). Wealth is also moved between national borders, allowing the wealthy to shop for the lowest tax location to stash their funds. Property can't be moved, but it can be financed with debt, making it taxed at effectively 0%. And the other side of that debt may just be an overseas shell company. There will be entire industries formed around avoiding a wealth tax, funded by the wealthy.
But probably the most capital efficient way to avoid the wealth tax is to buy politicians, influence the elections, and invest in lobbyist, which the wealthy do in the US to avoid taxes. Until money is removed from politics, I'm not holding out any hope that we'll find a way to tax the wealthy.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latter makes sense. We also don't let steam engines and carts pay taxes just because they 'replace' (=displace) human labor. Don't tax tools or income, tax the accumulation of it: wealth.
Taxing wealth is much harder on a practical and algorithmic level than taxing income. But either way, taxing the tool is micromanaging the problem, and some powerful people cynically promote that because they can aim the details away from themselves.
Raising money through taxing wealth is far easier than raising money through taxing income when nobody has jobs.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
The top 1% already pays more than 40% of all federal income tax at a 26.09% effective rate. The bottom 50% has an effective rate of 3.7% and contributes only 3% of all tax revenues. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?
If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest. What it would impact is how easily these people could influence the political system and get themselves out of trouble. At $400 billion net worth, Elon Musk could retire one hundred thousand times . He literally wrote multi-million dollar checks to various politicians and ran…
But what do you do with tesla/amazon/etc. then? Force elon to sell of his shares? Take them? What if the price drops? Give the shares back?
It's not like he has all that in money in his bank account, it's ownership of companies, their value is not real until someone else is willing to pay.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine this future could come true, if we're willing to accept that there would be many fewer people.
Just distribute the fruits of the automated labor. The robots and automations are like the trees and bushes from our gatherer's past. People would just take what they needed. No one would say: you are not allowed to take a berry from this bush because it's mine!!!
This would require some pretty huge cultural changes. People's modern sense of fairness, duty, and competition feed into stratification and instinctual tribalism.
Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
#320It feels really alien to discuss this in terms of "taxing AI", like an economic abstraction completely breaking down. Ultimately when you take automation to its logical conclusion we have people with needs and we have machines and automation capable of meeting those needs with minimal human labor. No matter how you try to resolve this economically, it should hold that if something can be produced with minimal human l…
Transition periods are always difficult, but they've always reached some equilibrium. Right now the spread between the two seem higher (not sure they are) but the system will bring them closer together.
World wars, revolutions, and violence are how we've reached equilibrium in the past.
We could, conceivably, learn from our mistakes and do something different now. But we're not.