Bill Gates says robots that take your job should pay taxes

duplicate, please check before submitting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13666124

Makes sense. It'll be political infeasible to increases taxes enough on the entities that will directly derive the most value from automation--robot manufacturers, businesses switching to automation, etc.

And because most of those profits will accumulate within a small segment of the population, it's not possible to tax the profits indirectly. Not enough will trickle down.[1] And it's politically difficult to increase taxes on the super rich much more than we already do. Taxing financial instruments--which is where the rich move and grow their wealth--is problematic. Taxing income and assets at a point where they're readily identifiable and easily enforceable is the most efficient and most equitable.

Plus, there's ample precedent in terms of personal property tax. Most basic example: some states tax cars. That's probably how a thing like this would be implemented--not as a type of income tax, but as a property tax.

[1] Lower prices of goods and services notwithstanding.

This is a great topic. We can think in this solution or in the Elon Musk solution, about that every person must to be a salary, working or not. I don't know what solution should be, but this is one of the main topic for the next decade.

You mean like taxing the hell out of Microsoft because they automated tons of jobs due to computers? Pay up Bill.