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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?

#781

Post by unethical_ban »

rayiner wrote: post #758
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.

Economists generally agree that taxing capital owners is bad policy and taxes should be directed at consumers: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... > Three: Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people. > Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For ev…

Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like consumption, so why tax it? Sales taxes discourage velocity of money. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose an income tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower income households.

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

#782

Post by Terr_ »

snovv_crash wrote: post #330
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A flat tax on wealth would be extremely easy to enforce.

The real problem has always been measuring "current wealth" with accuracy, fairness, and not spending more than you collect on an army of auditors.

I don't see how "flat" makes anything easier, since it's a downstream calculation.

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

#783

Post by pessimizer »

This is a powerfully stupid idea. The only reason to justify taxing income at all is because the government manages the relationship between employer and employee, and protects the employee from abuse - and even that's a bit shaky when it comes to income taxes, because the obligation to the government doesn't really scale up with income. Income taxes are new and weird. Other taxes are a lot easier to justify.

But the worst part is the idea of taxing automation and innovation. You might as well put a tax on intelligence and skill, because if you were dumber and hadn't learned anything, it would take more people to do your job. It's a comically stupid idea that no one is seriously considering.

It's just a distraction from taxing the usual suspects, the wealthy, who are more of a burden to government the more they own, and who are the least taxed they've ever been. Instead of being taxed by governments, they get direct cash grants, regulatory capture, intelligence agents and diplomats with a primary purpose of subverting and suborning foreign governments to their advantage, and perpetual wars to burn off their production.

The Western intellectual class is an annoying mix of morons and propagandists, often in the same person.

edit: US average wealth is 5x US median wealth.

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

#784

Post by int_19h »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #537
veunes wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the current debate is less about whether automation happens and more about where the gains go

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 same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes.

The people who are "automated away" and have reduced income are also less of a consumer. In a society where most jobs are automated, who are the consumers?

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

#785

Post by rayiner »

unethical_ban wrote: post #781
rayiner wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economists generally agree that taxing capital owners is bad policy and taxes should be directed at consumers: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... > Three: Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people. > Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For ev…

Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like consumption, so why tax it? Sales taxes discourage velocity of money. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose an income tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower income households.

Argue with the economists not with me.

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

#786

Post by BrenBarn »

nlitened wrote: post #142
BrenBarn wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I am fine with taking an approach to that that is just brutally tilted against large values and brutally tilted in favor of transparency. So like, you can't do anything with your ownership share in that privately-held company --- can't use it as collateral for a loan, can't present it to investors to get more funding, can't trade it, can't sell it, can't in any way derive any benefit from it --- without commi…

So why would anyone start businesses or continue doing business in such a country? You’re literally just describing an end to private property, where a privileged government representative can take anything you have. The “government job” will become so lucrative that the position would be passed down within families, father to son. It is already known how these economic systems function, I think.

I am describing a system where the government can take anything you have over a certain amount. (Or more precisely perhaps can take a proportion of what you have that asymptotically approaches 100% as your total wealth increases.) In my conception this money would then immediately be redistributed (as direct cash payments) to people with less. Government employees doing as you describe would also be subject to severe penalties. The purpose is to entirely eliminate massive wealth concentration.

As for why would anyone start a business? There's no disincentive to start a business in this scheme. I'd say the current system has greater obstacles to starting a business in many cases, due to high barriers to entry and regulatory capture by large players. The purpose of policies like the ones I describe is to encourage people to start small businesses and keep them small. You can grow your business up until its value is around that taxation threshold and then just kick back. We don't want people taking big businesses and making them bigger.

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

#787

Post by BrenBarn »

refurb wrote: post #220
BrenBarn wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I am fine with taking an approach to that that is just brutally tilted against large values and brutally tilted in favor of transparency. So like, you can't do anything with your ownership share in that privately-held company --- can't use it as collateral for a loan, can't present it to investors to get more funding, can't trade it, can't sell it, can't in any way derive any benefit from it --- without commi…

So you want to stop or severely disincentivize productive uses of capital? Sounds like a great way to throw the economy into a depression.

We currently live under the misapprehension that a company growing from a value of $100 million to a value of $1 billion is a "productive use of capital". My contention is that in general that is not true, and that kind of growth from big to bigger is harmful. We want to disincentivize the concentration of growth and capital in already-large companies, and incentivize the diffusion of wealth in many small enterprises that never grow huge.

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

#788

Post by platevoltage »

tt24 wrote: post #699
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.

Rich people pay pretty much all taxes in the United States.

Yeah, and they should pay more.

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

#790

Post by samdoesnothing »

huevosabio wrote: post #527

The answer is, no, just tax land value. Henry George, and David Riccardo before him, figured that as productivity and thus wealth increases the value accrues to the land owners, not capital not labor. This is because Land is the fundamental bottleneck of human activity, the core finite resource. And as everything else gets more productive, the land itself becomes more valuable. So, yes, tax Land, and redistribute as…

200 years ago that was true, now it's easier than ever to run a business with zero land.
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