vtsnowedin wrote:Tanada wrote:
That one is easy VT. You calculate how many workers robot X replaces. Then you add up the income taxes, medicare/medicaide/SSI taxes those workers would have paid working three shifts. Then you charge that number to the robot owner as an annual tax replacing the lost government tax revenue.
Not easy at all. First you have to choose a starting point in a technology that has been changing from day one. Is your point Henry Ford's 1927 model A assembly line Or GM's 1990 Silverado line? Or Toyota's 2020 Camry line? Then that calculation of how many humans the robot replaces is possible but not easy. Perhaps you would look at total labor cost per vehicle in your new line divided by average wage as compared to the starting point lines figures. Then if you set the tax too high you make domestic autos non competitive unless you impose offsetting import duties on imported autos.
Remember all taxes will actually be paid by the customers ie. you and I, not the corporations or it's executives as they will roll any taxes into the price of their products.
As much as I love history I know you can not change it so I would pick the annual average for the decade 2010-2019 and use that as my baseline. Trying to fix errors of the past when most of those alive today never knew what things were like before a certain date is a fools errand. If my Irish relatives all got the UK government to pay them reparations for hundreds of years of tyrannical rule it would not assuage the sins of the past, it would just be a money transfer from the taxpayers in todays UK to the reparations receivers in todays Ireland, a nation which has been functionally independent longer than most current residents have been alive. The same is true of almost every reparation claim anyone can make, the sole exceptions I can think of offhand would be the Jewish people who were given aid by Germany in the mid to late 20th century and the Japanese Americans who were made less damaged by reparations for treatment during WW II. In both cases those receiving compensation were victims who had personally suffered from the actions they were being compensated for.
In the case of mechanization destroying the tax base that keeps the system functional the injured party is the collective group of all taxpayers who are harmed by the actions which profit the corporations installing the mechanization. At the time of Henry Ford 1927 that you used individual taxes were small to the federal government and there was no SSI, Medicare-medicade and income taxes were almost entirely a corporate tax on businesses and only a small tax rate at that. The world has shifted so far from that pre-WW II lifestyle that comparisons of buying power and taxes are almost impossible to make a real comparison. Not to skip over the fact that the average elderly date of death was 62 instead of 79 which means we need a lot more money to care for the elderly portion of our population.