The answer to this post, and almost everything, is to tax the wealthy.
AI is not ruining anything. The people in control of it are.
The answer to this post, and almost everything, is to tax the wealthy. AI is not ruining anything. The people in control of it are.
This is the correct take, right here. Per the article, ““The trend toward automation and AI could lead to a decrease in tax revenues. In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income, says Sanjay Patnaik, director of the Center for Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution,” It’s the working plebs that are carrying the majority of the tax burden.
The rich can pay there fair share, or we can grind them up and feed the slush into a reverse osmosis machine during the water wars.
Tax wealth, not work
Tax productivity, not work. Worker productivity has skyrocketed in the past few decades, but taxes have remained constant. So the rich have been able to extract increasing amounts of productivity, while paying proportionally less and less in taxes. Meanwhile, worker wages have remained stagnant, meaning their productivity has gone up but they’re still being paid (and taxed) the same.
Wealth taxes should still absolutely be a thing, but they should be entirely divorced from a work (productivity) tax.
That sounds great, but how would you objectively quantify productivity
Tax wealth.
Of course it should. An industry run by AI, still needs roads and other public goods. Furthermore, the taxes can go towards UBI, allowing people to help guide the economy with their dollars and to ensure their personal wellbeing.
The big question is when do we remove human CEOs, and use their incomes for the common good?
No, but the companies using it should.
Companies:
I’m honestly fine with companies not paying taxes so long as their profits are being spent on people in lower tax brackets.
Current tax structure makes it easy for the company to just give all their profits to their executives.
70% tax on income over $1 million. Go back to a progressive tax structure for company profits. Not sure why my local donut shop is paying the same rate as Microsoft.
AI. Is huge capital investments. Just tax the wealth. Any fortune over 10 million has to pay 4% of the gross total per year.
This is a moronic take. Do we also tax tools when they make a 4 person job a 1/2 person job? This is just an ass backwards way of approaching the wealth inequality and poor working conditions issues by focusing on a tool instead of the system itself.
I mean, we easily could.
I pay property tax on my business tools.
So you just extend that concept. I don’t see why not.
ok apparently we do in fact tax tools. And I can see how AI, being on the cloud, might not normally fall under computer equipment or other things that would be taxed, thus needing it to be specifically included in tax law. Fuck me on that one.
I’ll give you that.
BUT
I still stand by this being a bandaid to a much larger problem concerning capitalists exploiting the labor of many and not being required to give everyone fair pay/equity. The inequality between the workforce and the ownership class is the problem. Them using AI is just their current tool of oppression, but not their only.
We need to address the root cause and directly tax the billionaires. And remove stock backed loans or at least realize their gains and tax them whenever they do use them as collateral for a loan. Shouldnt be able to claim unrealized gains and use it for collateral at the same time.
If companies start giving everyone fair pay/equity all the system collapse, even China the most communist country in the world right now don’t do that, inequity it’s what keep a certain amount of money flowing, unless you want all people dying of hunger or worst. I’m not saying capitalism is the perfect system but the imperfection of it it’s what make it work. we can’t pretend a perfect world is possible and make a living on dreaming. there will be always poor people and rich people just like there are smart people and dumb people, no everyone is equal.
I mean real world isn’t equal.
It isn’t black and white either.
It’s cooperation that got us here. It was that cooperation that made the infrastructure which without these people could not have accumulated the amount of wealth they are accumulating. The government’s sole purpose is insuring and guiding this cooperation. This should also include guiding a reasonable distribution of wealth. It will not be a prosperous society if only a few men have all the wealth and resources. This does not mean we should all have equal wealth either. But as a society, maybe we should rethink how we guide this distribution.
If you have a robot vacuum, should you pay it minimum wage? I think this is what the argument you bring up
How is paying a robot money in any way equivalent to paying a government to maintain society?
It’s definitely written by a modern journalist.
The less-sensational approach would be to ask if the companies using AI should have their taxes raised.
Seizing the means of production means pretty much exactly this, yes.
good luck, churches don’t even pay taxes
When computers replaced people are computers paying taxes.
If AI “destroys” jobs, then AI should not only pay taxes, but also contribute to health insurance, unemployment insurance and pension schemes. It doesn’t matter who ultimately pays. However, I would hold employers accountable, because they are the ones who are laying off employees in favour of AI.
AI shouldn’t pay taxes, but the companies making them should
Dumb article.
Should companies using computers in general pay a tax for it, a computer used to mean a human that calculated - computed - things by hand, after all?
But alarm clocks replaced knockeruppers, light bulbs replaced lamplighters, cars replaced coachmen, industrial robots replaced blacksmiths, we have no elevator operators, phone switch boards, traffic conductors, pin boys, link boys, ice cutters, scribes - the list of jobs made obsolete by technology during human history is massive.Generative AI, while widespread and disruptive, is just one more to the long list.
Good luck with that…
