The problem with these solutions is that production moves where it's cheaper. If you tax my robots, I'll just pack up and move them to another country where they are not taxed, or they are taxed less.
Yet somehow most countries are able to tax labor, income, land, and so on, without losing their entire populations.
Not to say that people won't leave because of taxes. Just that there are also reasons that make people stay.
- Look at your cell phone location information for last several months.
- Use Police's license plate trackers to track your car (Probably they do not even need court order for this one).
- They can get your car's location information (I assume high income people have one of modern expensive cars and most of them have tracker in case it is stolen).
- They can talk to your made(s) (I assume you have one, since you make 10+ mln) and pressure them to tell the true story.
Sounds really dangerous to lie about your location now days when it is so easy to check it, without even leaving the room.
That's because most of the population aren't free to give everything up because a government gradually makes their life slightly worse.
Just because the frog doesn't skip out of the saucepan, it doesn't magically mean that it's perfectly acceptable to keep turning up the gas.
These are, fundamentally, political-economic questions. Not merely one or the other.
More-over, I hardly think a tariff on the output of robotic labor applied only to expats who left the country for tax reasons is going to cause a trade war...
My robot submarines will run your coast guard surveillance and deliver goods tariff free.
I mean, the Fed can conjure trillions of dollars of investment capital out of thin air, I think 350 million people have a fair chance of choosing to operate a magic building that makes their lives better.
Which is ultimately what we are talking about. Should we operate highly automated factories and how should we divvy up the benefits from them?
automated robots = free labor = us not having to do it + receive their products
... it just isn't that straight forward. Currently it's heading towards:
automated robots = free labor for business owners = us not having those jobs + them still getting what we would have produced
Also, what cannot be ignored is the true drop in production costs because savings do get passed on to the consumer. This makes the politics difficult. If kittens died change would be much easier.
Not just corporations. All tax payers try to pay the least they can.
There are professional accountants who make a living by filing personal tax returns, and people pay them to advise them on tax deductions and investment schemes that lowers their tax bill.
sure robots and factories move to China with no taxes at first..but than Chinese gov figures out to pay for other infrastructure improvements to have things like the USA they have to tax something and end up taxing robots anyway..in fact its already happening
Other way to avoid paying VAT would be to hide the sale altogether which might be hard for company that makes and sells tons of stuff made by robots.