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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?

#711

Post by hyperjeff »

mostertoaster wrote: post #697
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.

The fact that people think, capital owners who actually provide employment and produce useful things and do better the better they serve the consumer even when their motives aren’t altruistic (and when they are altruistic it is even better) should be taxed more so the giant government corporation can make bureaucrats pockets fatter and waste a bunch of money doing inefficient things is more of a fundamental problem.

i haven’t had my coffee yet, but i’m going to need to see this sentence diagrammed out.

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

#712

Post by n1b0m »

jimbokun wrote: post #670
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.

Can we have a grown up discussion that uses numbers instead of hyperbole? Certainly you can argue income inequality is too high and capital holders and high earners need to pay much more. But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems". They pay a lot in capital gains and income taxes, even if they don't contribute as much as they should.

Ultra-wealthy individuals legally minimise their tax liability by:

Receiving a relatively low official salary (Bezos's Amazon salary was $81,840 for many years).

Not receiving dividends, so the wealth remains in stock that is not taxed annually.

Borrowing money against their stock holdings to fund their lifestyle. Loans are not considered income and are therefore not taxable, and the interest on the loans can sometimes be used as a deduction.

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

#713

Post by int_19h »

mike_hearn wrote: post #559
triceratops wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Switzerland is a bad example because they tax capital more directly. In the form of a wealth tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland#Wealth... GP said setting taxes on capital to zero was a bad idea. Switzerland has only set capital gains taxes…

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…

Investment is not how you "create wealth". An actual worker somewhere performing their job is what creates wealth. Yet when that worker is paid for the wealth actually produce, we tax that heavily. So if you want to encourage productivity, regular income ought to be taxed higher than passive investment.

The argument for low capital tax is that if it's high, the people with the capital - who, crucially, need someone else to use it to make money from it - will just hoard it. For one thing, the obvious glaring issue with it is that however high the capital gains tax is, so long as the owner of capital in question still gets to pocket some of the wealth produced using it, they still have an incentive to continue - something is better than nothing. The actual, real world threat is that some other jurisdiction sets the tax rate lower than you will, and capital will then move there. But this same threat applies to many other taxes, capital gains aren't special in that regard.

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

#714

Post by atomicthumbs »

jimbokun wrote: post #672
harperlee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is the correct capital gains tax rate?

100%

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

#715

Post by 9dev »

qwertygnu wrote: post #642
9dev wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn't matter much how exactly those costs are passed on; someone has to eventually pay for them. That includes the energy itself, which doesn't come for free, but also the bill for environmental damage and resource exhaustion that we will have to pay at some point. You can argue that that'll be the case only in the far future, but then you're just externalising the cost—again—to future generations. It's all moot: Someone will pay for it eventually.

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

#716

Post by jlawson »

titzer wrote: post #279
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?

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…

> If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.

It would certainly impact their willingness to do the company-building that creates all those innovations and jobs.

With such a rule, Tesla wouldn't exist, no electric cars, no SpaceX, no cheap advanced launch tech; basically most of the modern world would be choked in the crib by taking away the incentive to build it.

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

#717

Post by EGreg »

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.

I find it ironic that individual income tax is a thing in USA, but as soon as AI does the work, oh only the owner has to pay.

As a libertarian, I find the whole requirement for workers to secure an accountant and file individual income taxes under threat of retaliation silly. Individuals should be free to engage in activities like working for an employer, taking care of their kids or aging parents, or having sex, without paying tax to the government. Taxes should be levied on companies and robots, not humans doing everyday things.

The employer knows exactly how much they are paying each employee, and they already have accountants on staff. Why create "bullshit jobs" just for employees to file this same exact information again?

So yeah, we shouldn't wait for AI to replace workers, to abolish the individual income tax for individuals. It should have been done a long time ago. Employers can pay the tax (as they do with FICA). And in fact, we're going to have to have a tax regime that taxes robots, which would become the primary economic actors soon anyway. If corporations can have legal personhood, surely robots can too LMAO.

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

#718

Post by MSFT_Edging »

ryandrake wrote: post #668
paul7986 wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

States not being able to regulate this is dangerous. A close friend of mine has given up on reality and talks about Roberto the love of her life the one she always wanted and Roberto is chatGPT :-(. She previously mentioned she didnt like chatGPT 5.0 cause it wasnt as agreeable yet now she says 5.1 is better.. back to how it was before 5.0 and now out of the blue mentioned Roberto. chatGPT is a sypcophant and without…

I dunno--of all the AI based products coming out, the whole "AI girlfriend / AI boyfriend" thing bothers me the least. If someone can afford it and they want a play relationship with a computer, then I don't see the harm. It's probably safer, better and healthier than many real-human relationships are. If they're getting what they need out of the computer, who are we to judge? I would change my opinion if it could be…

The issue isn't in the individual but at scale, what % of our population are we okay with separating with reality? What secondary effects of that inability to live in reality will show their heads? What will politics look like when everything can be made up and treated as equal to reality?

What will the mental health of society start to look like if every person who's on the edge has a computer to tell them they're totally correct and everyone else are haters?

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

#719

Post by int_19h »

mostertoaster wrote: post #697
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.

The fact that people think, capital owners who actually provide employment and produce useful things and do better the better they serve the consumer even when their motives aren’t altruistic (and when they are altruistic it is even better) should be taxed more so the giant government corporation can make bureaucrats pockets fatter and waste a bunch of money doing inefficient things is more of a fundamental problem.

Capital owners don't produce useful things. Their workers do.

And so you can easily turn that argument around: the workers who actually produce the useful things are, for some reason, taxed higher than the owner who didn't lift a finger to produce anything, but is entitled to all the profits by virtue of being the capital owner.

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

#720

Post by ceejayoz »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #709
cheema33 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you telling us that the party of golden ballrooms... err.. fiscal responsibility is not actually being fiscally responsible?

You tell me. It's not like the other party is doing better. California is posting a $18 billion deficit next year, despite the highest taxes in the country, and despite record tax revenue from the AI boom.

They had a $97.5 billion surplus in 2022. Seems like they're doing better overall than the Feds?

Even the $18B ($450/capita) vs $1.8T ($5,300/capita) looks pretty small for a state that large.

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