Should the US implement a ‘robot tax?’

techcrunch.com

14 points·rntn··10 comments

How about a computing tax? Or a Microsoft Excel tax? Or an electricity tax?

I think we could combine all of those into an efficiency tax, any productivity that outpaces the baseline of what an average (otherwise untrained) highschool graduate can produce is taxed in proportion to the relative increase in productivity.

Just trying to understand this better… how would this even work if a country were trying to foster innovation?

You hire people. They automate their own job, you lay them off, you pay their salary as tax anyways. Therefore there's no incentive to rush automation to eliminate workforce. As more and more gets automated, people can work on automating what isn't automated yet, or differently automating what is to make it more efficient.

There's no slackening of the incentive to innovate, just the removal of a tendency of innovation to ine itably lead to centralization of capital .

It wouldn't, my suggestion was sarcastic.

And then maybe redistribute those taxes back to the people contributing the least to the community. That system could be named, something like “societ-ism” or “communit-ism”. idk just spitballing

As an anarchist, I wholeheartedly support the Microsoft Excel tax

Not until they make up a majority of our manufacturing.

Is Nvidia or TSMC abusing it's market position?

One could feed the robot tax into UBI. But libertarian countries could be free of such.

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