[BrianC]

A Modest Robot Levy Could Help Combat Effects of Automation On Income Inequality In US, Study Suggests (mit.edu) 124
Posted by BeauHD on Thursday December 22, 2022 @09:30PM from the taxing-tech dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News:
What if the U.S. placed a tax on robots? The concept has been publicly discussed by policy analysts, scholars, and Bill Gates (who favors the notion). Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them would give firms incentive to help retain workers, while also compensating for a dropoff in payroll taxes when robots are used. Thus far, South Korea has reduced incentives for firms to deploy robots; European Union policymakers, on the other hand, considered a robot tax but did not enact it. Now a study by MIT economists scrutinizes the existing evidence and suggests the optimal policy in this situation would indeed include a tax on robots, but only a modest one. The same applies to taxes on foreign trade that would also reduce U.S. jobs, the research finds.

"Our finding suggests that taxes on either robots or imported goods should be pretty small," says Arnaud Costinot, an MIT economist, and co-author of a published paper detailing the findings. "Although robots have an effect on income inequality ... they still lead to optimal taxes that are modest." Specifically, the study finds that a tax on robots should range from 1 percent to 3.7 percent of their value, while trade taxes would be from 0.03 percent to 0.11 percent, given current U.S. income taxes. "We came in to this not knowing what would happen," says Ivan Werning, an MIT economist and the other co-author of the study. "We had all the potential ingredients for this to be a big tax, so that by stopping technology or trade you would have less inequality, but ... for now, we find a tax in the one-digit range, and for trade, even smaller taxes."

[...] Apart from its bottom-line tax numbers, the study contains some additional conclusions about technology and income trends. Perhaps counterintuitively, the research concludes that after many more robots are added to the economy, the impact that each additional robot has on wages may actually decline. At a future point, robot taxes could then be reduced even further. "You could have a situation where we deeply care about redistribution, we have more robots, we have more trade, but taxes are actually going down," Costinot says. If the economy is relatively saturated with robots, he adds, "That marginal robot you are getting in the economy matters less and less for inequality."
The paper, "Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation," appears in advance online form in The Review of Economic Studies.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/ ... y-suggests

[Newfie]

Interesting. We have briefly discussed this elsewhere in this forum before. If robots or AI are replacing workers then we need to either tax them or find a different method if raising revenue.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Yes, interesting. I don't see how taxing a small portion of their value accomplishes much though. If the goal is to help with income inequality or preventing millions of low level jobs from being completely eliminated, then it seems like a tax on what is produced at some fairly significant portion of the value would make more sense.

If the concern is actually about the major impact smart robots taking a HUGE portion of low level jobs would have on the US economy and the middle class, then taxing the robots by a few or even 30 percent would hardly make a dent, if they're replacing 20 shifts of workers a week, or 160 hours a week of work, or 4 full time workers (allowing a full shift for maintenance, etc. down time).

And if over time, robots get so good that no one CARES about the low level jobs, then fine, let them do all such work reliably and accurately. HOWEVER, there is still a country to run and government isn't free, so it still seems like taxing a decent amount of the production is needed. One thing about doing that is it stops all the games companies play re corporate income taxes, where the end up paying little to no taxes, despite having many $billions in revenue. And it won't take semi-trailers full of complex forms to compute such a tax.

[Plantagenet]

Wait a minute on that taxation plan.....

Corporations are shifting to robots because they are more efficient and more productive then human workers.

This will result in cheaper products and more economic growth in the US economy, which in turn will benefit all Americans. The more rapidly we can grow the US economy and increase GDP the greater wealth in our society and the greater likelihood of higher wages and more wealth for all Americans.

Taxing robots will just make them and everything they make more expensive, which is the opposite of what want in our economy.

We've already got record inflation in the economy due to the record deficits being caused by Joe Biden's out of control spending. Taxing robots would just add more costs and more inflation to the economy which is the opposite of what we want.


Free the ROBOTS!!!!! Keep them TAX FREE!!

[Newfie]

Not record inflation, I have seen it much worse. 18% mortgage rates?

We DO have record debt.

The point is that much of our Federal Income is from Income Tax, taxes on human workers. And that makes sense when humans are doing the production. But also the corporations are indirectly paying that tax, which comes back to the consumer. The workers wage must raise to cover taxes, production costs go up, corp passes the increase to the consumer.

Corporations are shifting to robots etc. and the they then have a more stable production cost. They do not lay for, wages, health care, insurance and all the other items that go into human cost.

When one robot eliminates say 10 humans the corporation gets a huge savings, and the Feds loose 10 people from the income stream, who then need assistance to retrain l, go on unemployment, or otherwise convert from an asset to a liability.

I am in favor of AI and robotics as a hedge against our aging demographic AND thus a way to reduce illegal immigration. If we don’t need those low cost workers then we will tighten border controls. And remember, todays low cost worker soon enough becomes a liability as they age out of the work force.

However we do it we need a MASSIVE rewrite of our tax laws to recognize these new realities. We need to be flexible.

[mousepad]

AND thus a way to reduce illegal immigration. If we don’t need those low cost workers then we will tighten border controls.

We never needed mass immigration. (Go and ask some Indians about their experience with mass immigration).
The only ones that benefit from low cost imports are wealthy owners of large businesses and for only one reason. To sell their shit to a growing population. For everybody else there's zero benefit in mass immigration. It swamps the labor market, depressing wages for the most vulnerable members of society, the low skilled workers. It creates social stress, destroys identify and cohesion. On top of that, instead of culturally absorbing the imports, cultural division thru wokism is preached by the demwits.

Also in a world of overconsumption and environmental degradation it is a very bad idea trying to lift up millions of imports to a high powered consumer lifestyle. It almost makes me wonder if the demwits are aware of global warming? It certainly doesn't seem like. Adding millions of high performance consumers AND encouraging consumption of gas by recklessly lowering the gas price. But then again, what can you expect from traitors like Sleepy and his crew?

While the entertainer Donald is labeled a traitor for throwing a party at the capitol, the real traitor is busy destroying the world while his voters cheer. What fools!

[Newfie]

Mouse, no arguments from this quarter. It is just not an argument I want to engage in ATM. There are plenty of reasons to limit immigration.