371–380 of 1001 posts
Theres nothing special or holy about income tax. If there’s no more income to tax, that burden gets shifted to corporate tax in some way. Whether it’s across the board or something more fussy like “taxing AI” is just implementation detail.
Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors? I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).
I'm not arguing for taxing AI (or tractors) -- but...if we made the wrong decision 100yrs ago, should we make the wrong decision again? It is worth debating.
No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social syst…
Avoiding tax through various loopholes that Capital gets a seat at the table to help craft, while benefitting from externalizing the costs to taxing labor is just corruption.
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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?
> How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share? How exactly do you propose that they pay their fair share when they literally do not have the money or assets to do so? Are you proposing modern day slavery? Perhaps people selling their family? I'm curious what happens if you take this line of thought to it's actual conclusion.
No, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI. The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
I'm all for raising taxes is on the rich but the government is extremely fiscally irresponsible. The current interest on our national debt is greater than our military spending. So if you increase taxes some people think it would just be throwing it into the money fire of Washington. There needs to be a lot of changes in D.C.: term limits in congress, citizens united needs to be repealed, erc etc
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100% agree! I find quite concerning that this point is not immediate in any conversation about AI or robots impacting the number of jobs, and the subsequent conversation about innovating new taxes. AI and robots are capital as any other automation on a factory, and capital gains should be taxed appropriately. This is not a new thing completely separate from the untouchable status quo wrt existing taxes. If it tickles…
The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators. How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other f…
Tractors largely replaced human labour in farming about a hundred years ago. Should we have started taxing tractors? I really have difficulties seeing AI as anything else than yet another type of machinery. If your argument is "but it's replacing ALMOST ALL human labour" - well, the same argument was valid for tractors a hundred years ago (when almost everyone was employed in agriculture).
This argument hinges rather strongly on whether or not AI is going to create a broad, durable, and lasting unemployment effect. Tractors did not cause this phenomenon because jevons paradox kicked in and induced demand rendered the problem moot, or demand eventually exceeded what mere tractors were capable of doing for agricultural productivity. The same can probably be said for contemporary AI, but it's tough to tel…
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Financial assets are extremely easy to hide. Set up an international chain of shell companies, foundations, and trusts, install a fake beneficial owner or trustee or two at various points, carve out deductibles for IP and "services", and the ownership becomes completely opaque. And that's just the legal version. I know someone who used to work as a business lawyer. She spent years trying to track down the true owners…
A flat tax on wealth would be extremely easy to enforce. Basically if the bill for an asset doesn't get paid it goes to the government, and the bill is trivial to calculate because it doesn't need the rest of the entity.
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Folks like to hate on capital gains tax. I think it's perceived as a rich-person deal. But homeowners, do they get taxed each year on the increase in value of their house? Almost the same thing, but not hated on the same way.
Homeowners get taxed every year on the value of their property. Let's do that to stocks, too.
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This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social syst…
If your argument were true we should set taxes on capital to zero, which is quite obviously a bad idea.