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Comment by nuancebydefault | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of taxing machines (and use that for UBI)

Today the race between human and machines is not so much 'unfair' because of the machines' speed and efficiency, but moreso because of unfair taxes: people and businesses get to pay taxes for each hour of human labour, but receive tax deductions for using all non-human resources like energy, machines and offices.

It's time to rethink the tax and economic models such that a lot of people will benefit from machines' efficiency, not only the happy few who happen to be in control.

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How do you propose "taxing machines"? Everything I can think of has obvious and large downsides, e.g.

- filing taxes for each machine (companies may have millions of machines)

- determining how much income all machines make (for machines used by humans, e.g. sewing machines, how do you determine what percentage of the income is made by the human vs the machine)

- taxing cloud usage (How to determine netflix's % income made by cloud vs by advertising, by original content, etc)

> - filing taxes for each machine (companies may have millions of machines)

Yes. It may be harder to figure out the definition of a machine - e.g. a computer can have multiple programs running, is it one machine? - but this is one direction.

> - determining how much income all machines make

Yes, it's tricky, but we can try. For example, some temporary measurements which can be updated every few years?

> - taxing cloud usage

Yes, we can measure power, bandwidth, network sessions for that.

Wouldn't it be easier to increase taxes for high profit income and give tax incentives for increasing human labor on payroll?

High profit income is already taxed in a cumulative way (at least where i live).

Profit equals revenue minus costs. It is financially relatively interesting today to have a high cost (typically going to machines, buildings, energy, advertising, financial services and business trips), because it makes the (tax on) profits lower.

Just tax revenue or profit per employee, which has risen ~5x in the last 25 years among the S&P 500.

Sorry, I don't see how taxing income per employee translates to taxing machines

How do you think the S&P500 was able to increase profit per employee by 5x?

Today every penny spent by a company that is not going to humans, is a cost, and leads to a tax reduction. Somehow those pennies are meticulously counted, so I don't see how it would be hard to measure.

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