Yeah, no.
Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
81–90 of 201 posts
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or those who gained a lot from the crisis? It's not like they were planning for a pandemic; for e.g. zoom this was simply a windfall. Why not tax that?
"Why not punish people for building the infrastructure that helped us survive this crisis?"
Straw man. I never said the taxes should cancel out their entire gains.
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#83Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#84>Economists at Deutsche Bank suggest a tax of 5% of a worker's salary if they choose to work from home. >The tax would be paid for by employers and the income generated would be paid to people who can't do their jobs from home. That's what we want. We want to give people an economic incentive to go out and mix with people in the middle of a pandemic. I'm working from home right now, but if you told me 5% of my pay wo…
> We want to give people an economic incentive to go out and mix with people in the middle of a pandemic.
No, but we do want to incentivize those essential workers who are risking their health and who are often at or barely above minimum wage. Workers at long term care homes, grocery stores, schools, et cetera.
But such a plan is only superficially similar to the crazy Deutsche Bank plan.
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#85Counterpoint: Tax employers additionally, since they now face lower rent and spend less on office supplies and coffee. Or, hell, tax high-income earners. For instance bank executives working for shady banks
In the article, it says > The tax would be paid for by employers and the income generated would be paid to people who can't do their jobs from home. But somehow nobody in this thread seems to have read that sentence.
I read it and I still disagree strongly.
As an employer I would have an incentive to request works to show up in the office in order to not pay that tax.
Let’s say for a big company scaling down workspace they can offset the tax. For smaller companies it might actually be more cost effective to keep the office and demand works to come in.
Also why should anyone subsidise someone because their job requires them to be physically somewhere? Also why stop there? Why not tax ppl who have a less stressful job? Or less mentally demanding? Or less physically demanding? And then distribute that tax around.
Honestly, I chose to be a CS because I can work from home. That was the one thing that made me switch from medicine or experimental physics. Why should I be put in a worse situation because of that. And finally I have invested heavily into creating a room in my flat that acts as an office: Multiple monitors, desk, chair, servers, gigabit internet, etc. This contribution to the economy would not have happened if I was not WFH.
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a bit like taxing cyclists 10 % of their income because they don't support the car industry... Good analogy. But their argument is even worse because they don't look at the other benefits of remote work on the economy.
It is scary that so many so called economists are strangers to the concept of opportunity cost...
It's much more likely that this comes from a PR team aiming to achieve commercial goals of Deutsche Bank.
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#87Yeah, no, fuck off Deutsche Bank. How would they track if I'm working from home anyway?
Daytime usage of residential internet connections? I'd be surprised if ISPs didn't have a record of that already.
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#88Taxes have many purposes, and one of them is incentivizing preferred behaviors. Why should we discourage working from home? Is wasting a significant part of your life commuting to work really that good for the society? It's certainly not for the environment.
Also, there are many hidden drawbacks of working from home – it's more socially isolating, the work-life balance suffers, setting up a home office may be costly. I can imagine such a tax making working from home not worth it for lots of people.
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#89Might Deutsche Bank be sitting on a non performing commercial real estate portfolio? Alan Sugar (British Trump equivalent) similarly issued a demand for people to "get their asses back in the office" after telling everybody his commercial real estate portfolio wasn't performing: https://www.standard.co.uk/business/lord-sugar-offices-prope... https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/03/lord-alan-sugar-calls-on-gove...
I came here to say that it was about commercial real estate incentives and glad to see someone pointed it out. Seems like the obvious reason why someone would suggest such an otherwise ludicrous idea, backed up by such fallacious reasoning. It’s a bit of an insult that they believe anyone would fall for it.
Re: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank
#90I cringe every time I see a plan of the form "tax x to help y", with some supposed relation between x and y as justification. Is x something we want to discourage? Does y need help the most? These questions are completely unrelated. If x is something we want to discourage, we should tax it, then think about how to best spend the money. If y needs help the most we should help, then think about whether to spend less on…
I agree with this mostly but what about the following:
Tax a very small % for automation at grocery stores. Low enough tax so that it is still profitable to automate checkout but also so that you don’t get a huge dump of unemployed ppl on the street.