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If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

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Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#641

Post by techblueberry »

pyrolistical wrote: post #640
ashleyn wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When most of the human population were farmers should we have taxed advances in agriculture which destroyed the everybody’s job?

Yes

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#642

Post by qwertygnu »

9dev wrote: post #346
dns_snek wrote: post #221

It 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…

You're completely omitting externalised cost, though. As it stands, all this production requires gargantuan amounts of energy that have to come from somewhere, and cause pollution and waste that must be accounted for. As long as these factors aren't solved—if they can be solved in the first place—either the prices for consumers or the manufacturing cost must reflect this, I don't see the increased degree automation a…

How does more pollution/waste equal higher consumer cost? Do you mean because we'll have to pay more taxes because we'll need more publicly funded resources to clean up the excess waste? Or because corporations would pass the price of the fines for violating environmental regulations onto consumers?

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#643

Post by welshwelsh »

fzeroracer wrote: post #307
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #271

Earlier 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?

> 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.

How about instead of taxes, we have a $10,000 per year subscription fee to live in society.

Maybe different depending on area, like $20,000 a year to live in NYC but only $2,000 per year to live in a rural village.

If you can't afford the fee that's OK, it just means you have to live outside of the developed areas and don't benefit from any services provided by the government. But you are free to set up a tent in the woods and live off the land.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#644

Post by triceratops »

zozbot234 wrote: post #407
robinhoode wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. Why should workers care about being more productive if they do not reap the rewards in terms of wages? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ...

Total compensation involves more than just wages. Providing benefits such as healthcare coverage is inherently expensive, since productivity gains in healthcare have been limited.

That's not such an ironclad argument lmao. If we are to believe Baumol's cost disease, rising productivity in other sectors is partly responsible for healthcare cost increase.

Obviously I don't seriously believe we should depress productivity so that nurses make less money and hospital stays are cheaper. But, you know, it doesn't make it untrue.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#645

Post by triceratops »

kiba wrote: post #635
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Point one: higher productivity is not necessarily our goal. I could think of numerous industries that would make the world better if they did less work. Point two: There's a moral absurdity in taxing the wages earned by labor more heavil…

It's both. You don't want to tax capital and income. VAT and sale tax are a bad idea too, especially since they're regressive. So, what do you tax? You tax land and land-like things, non-reproducible privileges(like patents and copyright), pollution and other negative externality. Now, there's an argument to be made that we couldn't possibly be able to fund governments on the back of these taxes. Fair enough, but it…

You don't want to tax pollution and other negative externalities to raise revenue though.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#646

Post by barrenko »

pjc50 wrote: post #479
slowmovintarget wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ronald Coase. https://economics.com.au/2013/09/03/coasian-thinking/ ; more broadly he has some great writing on the "theory of the firm".

Mmm, Coase is my jam.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#648

Post by haizhung »

lab14 wrote: post #523
doener wrote: post #184

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.

Is there any time in human history where this wasn't the case? Genuinely curious.

After world war 2, most of the western world had wealth taxes. The US had eg. >90% income taxes, and death taxes of up to 77% on inherited wealth.

You know, exactly that span of time that everyone agrees on being really prosperous.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#649

Post by mike_hearn »

kiba wrote: post #626
mike_hearn wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's been a common proposal from economists pretty much since people started examining how economies work. Some places do have a capital gains tax of zero. Switzerland is one of them, and Switzerland is economically more successful than the rest of Europe. Tax is one of those issues where there are actually correct and incorrect answers, thanks to many hundreds of years of active experimentation and relatively…

An ideal LVT would tax the full economic rent of the land, but that's unlikely to happen. We don't want to overshoot 100% because that would cause land abandonment. So in theory, LVT could collect more tax than the state needs to fund services. If that happen, it would be distributed as a Citizen's Dividend. I am skeptical that we wouldn't be able to find a productive use for government spending, but that's a discuss…

I never understood this Georgist argument. The richest people in the world today require very little land. Remote working is easily possible and plenty of companies use it, even if managers don't always like it. This feels like a medieval perspective.

Re: If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

#650

Post by mike_hearn »

triceratops wrote: post #639
mike_hearn wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Switzerland. It's an excellent example of a place without a capital gains tax, because it doesn't have one. I didn't say it doesn't have other taxes! The type of tax matters a lot. The reason capital gains taxes are bad is that they discourage investment, but investment is how you create wealth. "Creating wealth" is ultimately a synonym for creating material progress. Voters like progress, and so this is a…

Let's summarize: airstrike : zero taxes on capital are a bad idea mike_hearn : Switzerland has no capital gains taxes and it's great. triceratops : Ok but it still taxes capital. mike_hearn : I live in Switzerland. No capital gains taxes are great and everywhere other than Switzerland has a lower tax rate for them than income because we want more capital gains. Also wealth taxes can cause startup founders to be taxed…

You're right, the origin of this thread was making an argument about all taxes on capital, not just capital gains. I missed that, I guess because nobody mentioned wealth taxes specifically and it's fairly rare for taxes on capital to mean anything other than capital gains tax. Mea culpa.

> The startup wealth tax problem has another solution: allow payment in non-voting startup shares, instead of liquid cash

This is an excellent idea! Did you come up with this yourself or have you heard of others proposing it?

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