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.
First, just like there are indices for all kinds of economic variables which adjust as technology changes, there would need to be one or more robotic indices that would give some idea using some sort of objective standard for how many humans are being replaced per robot of class X. Then those indices could be adjusted periodically, perhaps annually, to reflect the state of robotics for a given industry, profession, etc. at that time.
That's an example of something government tends to do reasonably well, re keep track of statistics, measure things, etc. And since government collects the taxes, it's appropriate that they do that work.
Second, all taxes should be set at an appropriate level. There's nothing special about robot taxes in that regard, so that's not a valid issue against robot taxes.
Given that the robot doesn't get sick, doesn't goof off, doesn't skip work to deal with a bad mood, etc. the employer is still better off even if they have to pay ALL the taxes that the human would pay who the robot displaces. That would be a good amount to start with, per Tanada's suggestion, but that could evolve as revenue needs evolve.
Third, and this is key -- to the extent that smart robots displace a huge set of workers who then can't get viable work (are rendered obsolete), to ignore the problem is to basically tell the workers to exist only on shrinking government handouts (as the tax base shrinks as workers become obsolete). Until what, they mostly starve to death or die from exposure, etc? Given how people now riot and demonstrate over minor things, how much of THAT will be able to occur before you have a problem too big to contemplate? So just ignoring the issue until it blows up in our face is a TERRIBLE idea (though it is how the US approaches a LOT of governing in recent years and even decades).
And finally, yes, taxes are all paid by people. Including corporate taxes, and robot taxes companies own. Liberals who try to deny this are either deluding themselves or trying to game some issue agenda, but taxes aren't paid by magical entities or nothing, they're paid by people, and the vast majority of people are ordinary consumers.
But so what? Either something should be done by government or it shouldn't. And the revenues for government come from taxes. So the fact that people pay taxes doesn't change the issue of robot taxes, re whether they should exist.