701–710 of 1001 posts
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.
The top 1% of earners in the US pay 40% of all income taxes. https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/
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.
The top 1% of earners in the US pay 40% of all income taxes. https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-taxes-billionaire-tax-ra...
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
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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.
The tax is his shares, those shares become public assets, the government and (ostensibly) the citizens finally get a say in what the hell is happening with that guy.
You have a vendetta against a guy, for grievances, some legitimate, and want the law to change, specifically to get him, because you hate what he says. You also want to nationalize his businesses, that he built, that he did not have to build, that now employ 140,000 people, that he did not have to employ, with those 140,000 people almost all being high income earners paying higher tax rates when they may not have otherwise, out of your hate.
I would call that greed and a despicable position.
On that note, it's also completely pointless. If you were to literally liquidate every billionaire in America, every single one, and somehow got current market rates for every single stock share, 100% tax rate beyond $1B... we would cover the deficit for 3 years. With everyone else still paying taxes. Then we're back to square one, running a $2T deficit every year with no billionaires to liquidate. It's entirely catharsis that accomplishes nothing. If such a tax were even passed, we wouldn't make it to the next election cycle before it's a problem again.
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The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes. The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.
> The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago access to housing is incredibly expensive. Measuring their purchasing power for how many scented candles they can buy is pretty meaningless when they are much closer to homelessness than ever before.
No, you should collect less taxes.
Those two things cannot possibly be true at the same time. If wealth, energy, and leisure become unlimited, we hardly have a use case for taxes.
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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…
> 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...
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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'…
Are you telling us that the party of golden ballrooms... err.. fiscal responsibility is not actually being fiscally responsible?