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Comment by harperlee | Hacker News Reader

100% agree! I find quite concerning that this point is not immediate in any conversation about AI or robots impacting the number of jobs, and the subsequent conversation about innovating new taxes. AI and robots are capital as any other automation on a factory, and capital gains should be taxed appropriately. This is not a new thing completely separate from the untouchable status quo wrt existing taxes. If it tickles your political kneejerk, explore that, but playing tax sci-fi is distracting and thus dangerous.

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This is not an easy question. It seemingly boils down to: what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?

However, the root questions are: what should the state provide, how much, and of what nature? A secondary question then becomes how important the redistributive aspect is. That’s what you’re seemingly alluding to when you say: people work, get taxed on it, but others automate that work and this automation does not get taxed.

Following that line of thinking makes sense, but it also contradicts the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

If the goal of redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal, given that automation is arguably one of the strongest natural drivers of higher living standards overall.

Of course, the counterpoint to “what and how much should the state provide” is “who should pitch in, and how much,” which is what you’re focusing on. I mostly agree that everyone should be taxed fairly, but I also see many exemption cases, because taxes are friction and we often want certain things to be frictionless. For example, I would oppose taxes on life-saving surgeries. But where do you draw the line? What about automation that indirectly enables or improves life-saving surgery?

> the core benefit of automation

The core benefit of automation is to give back time to humans to free us to do more creative things with our big beautiful brains. At least, that would be the core benefit if humanity was on a positive trajectory.

There are core features of the state that we have collectively agreed must be provided - social safety (including police and safety nets), infrastructure, defense, core research funding and more.

The cost of providing the basic obligations and debt service of the U.S. amounts to roughly 1/3rd of the U.S. GDP, while taxation on any activity induces friction and higher costs - the bill will need to be paid either via capital markets or taxation. The investment in automation is no more important than food, or my children's education in my view.

Taxation is generally preferable for capital owners compared to currency debasement and forced debt purchases as it maintains boundaries on what the state can and cannot do. If the current trend is towards a greater share of the economy accruing to capital owners is maintained, then capital taxes will eventually need to rise to sustain state obligations.

'taxed fairly'

This could be almost any tax system depending on the what one views as "fair".

Nah, you could reasonably regard a tax system where everybody pays <2% of their income in tax as fair and likewise one where everybody pays 50%, but there is no way to call a system fair where ordinary working people pay higher effective rates than multinational corporations.

The tax rate for corporations should be zero. The need to do tax accounting and associated financial engineering is a deadweight economic loss. Eliminate corporate income tax and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Ultimately the profits flow to those individuals one way or another so better to collect all the tax revenue from them anyway. This change would increase economic growth and benefit everyone.

That would work if you were going to use VAT for everyone, but as long as you're using income tax for individuals, setting the corporate rate to zero would be an obvious tax dodge. You'd put all your assets and income into a corporation that pays no taxes and then have it loan you money when you want to spend it on something.

That's not an actual problem. The IRS already has clear rules requiring that certain corporate expenses are treated as taxable individual income if they directly benefit a particular employee or investor.

> The IRS already has clear rules requiring that certain corporate expenses are treated as taxable individual income if they directly benefit a particular employee or investor.

I replied to GP with the same thought as you, but I think there might be some merit in the "loan" angle.

Lets look at the case that you operate as a consultant/contractor/etc. Your "startup" starts making some very large revenue, and you'd like to use that money to pay rent, go on vacation, pay for surgery, etc.

Any money (say, $amount) the business pays on your behalf (hospital, landlord, etc) is considered your personal income and taxed appropriately.

But, if the books reflect that it was given as a loan, and you are now on the books as a debtor (with the business being your creditor), then that specific $amount isn't taxed as your personal income (loans aren't considered income, as far as I know, because they are a liability).

So, as long as you are in control of the business, the business doesn't need to initiate the "pay back now or we start legal proceedings" process. What instead happens is that this loan amount in the business books just grows and grows (interest accumulates) until the business dies/ends/is sold without ever collecting on it.

As long as the business itself does not have outstanding creditors when it eventually comes to an end, that "loan" can be just written off.

What's the revenue service going to do? Claim that businesses can't write off debt anymore?

There's a simple way out of it if you just want to get rid of double taxation though: Make dividends a tax deduction to the corporation. Then if the corporation makes money and doesn't issue it as dividends, they pay tax on it. If they do, the corporation doesn't, but the investor does. And then it gets taxed once one way or another but not twice.

> That would work if you were going to use VAT for everyone, but as long as you're using income tax for individuals, setting the corporate rate to zero would be an obvious tax dodge. You'd put all your assets and income into a corporation that pays no taxes and then have it loan you money when you want to spend it on something.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for individuals: tax codes in, well, every first world jurisdiction, are very clear that any money going to an individual for their exclusive use is taxed.

I operate as a consultancy (registered tax-paying business); If I use my revenue to pay my bond or get surgery, that $amount is considered personal income even if the company pays for it.[1]

The real problem is that corporations are taxed on profit and individuals are taxed on revenue!

All the costs that a corporation has to foot just to remain in existence is tax-deductible. All the costs that an individual has to foot to remain in existence is taxed (double-taxed, in some cases).

A corporation that pays $amount for rent won't pay tax on $amount in income, while an individual who pays $amount in rent is taxed on the $amount in income.

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[1] I hear what you are saying about a loan that is paid back, and maybe that is one loophole I can explore, but the revenue services have seen all "hacks" and this is no doubt one of them. This is why the tax codes are so complex and convoluted - each time a hack is discovered, a new code is added to specifically shutdown that loophole. The only remaining "hacks" are those that are allowed anyway by the overall tax policy, like "individuals are taxed on all revenue, corporates are taxed on profits only"

I think each company should pay a low rate on all money passing through. Let’s say 0.1 to 1%. Building huge pyramids of shell companies has probably no economic benefit and is mostly done to evade some regulation or taxes or liability. The ideas how to abuse this are too numerous to count so the government should not try to but simply disincentivize the use of corporations just a little bit. The cost would be borne by the individuals who have the most elaborate company architectures which is probably synonymous with the biggest tax evaders.

You could argue that the point of creating an oligopoly and then squeezing customers after the fact also is adding friction. All value creation is not great for the people. But it is hidden under the name. Financial engineering and rent-seeking are getting quite advanced nowadays, because of the political class.

I like the idea of classifying it into four buckets: those that are below tax net gains for a country, those who are above and those that are above the tax net gains using just their wealth, and then the government.

> extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state

This is extremely aggressive framing. It smashes together two wildly different kinds of citizen with wildly different, often opposing incentives and access to power: those who sell their labor for a living and those who literally own the economy. It poses them both in opposition to the government which has 1/5th the revenue of the latter.

If capital is the big bad, this framing is a mind-virus that makes the problem hard to think about and speak about.

> friction

Friction plays a key role in "the unreasonable effectiveness of capitalism." It's a big part of the reason why we can rig the game in favor of capital and not simply have the economy immediately degenerate into "capital rules, labor drools" due to the exponentials inherent in "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are."

Removing friction is not necessarily a net good if it contributes more to distributional problems than it relieves in deadweight loss. Nobody is a fan of deadweight loss, but I'd be a lot more sanguine about eliminating it if I thought we had a credible handle on the distributional problems. But we don't.

> what are fair ways to extract value from citizens for the shared value of the state?

The right question is who benefits the most from state’s services. For example if a whole lot of security, legislative or admin services go to protecting the capital, then those who has the most capital need to chip in the most.

> redistribution is usually that “more” people reach a higher standard of living, then adding taxes and friction to processes like automation may conflict with that goal

This is basically a 50 year old trickle down argument. But real wages have not increased in comparison to gdp since 70s, so nothing trickled down. We are demonstratedly bad at sharing what we have achieved together, no reason to believe more tech will magically get better treatment than that.

Besides redistribution is not about shifting the curve up, but making it flatter - see gini coefficient.

> the core benefit of automation, which is to delete non-needed work, make things cheaper, and make the value creator richer.

Except the era of classical capitalism and inventor’s profit is over, since 70s it is rentiers unreciprocated extraction on top of purported value people didn’t necessarily ask for or need in the first place. Likewise most people aren’t dying for AI automation, and not even for structural threats; it is not even proven that it will provide a net total productivity gain when the hype cools down, despite being shoved down people’s throats.

Let’s not kid ourselves, there is little concern for real value creation but a capture-the-flag on a gigantic data-moated compute monopoly. Whatever democratic means enabled proper taxation would have already prevented this type of speculative berserk, failures of which I assure you will be socialized.

So friction = societal consent, internalizing externalized costs, revealing what is actually value versus monopolist’s rent. It is healthy for the society, it is healthy for capitalism.

Actually real wages have increased a lot since the 70s if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance. The problem is that a lot of that money is being wasted by an inefficient healthcare system, and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place.

>if you count employer contributions to employee heath insurance

You shouldn't.

>and employers probably shouldn't even be involved in sponsoring group health plans in the first place.

They are free to lobby for socialized medicine, but they don't because they like how the current system helps lock employees into bad jobs for any amount of healthcare.

If you're trying to understand changes in the share of income going to workers versus employers, then you must count those contributions. For the average family, employers pay $20,143 annually in premiums: https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/annual-family-premiu....

From the perspective of the employer, that's real money, no different than if they had paid the $20,143 directly to the employee as wages. It's not the employer's concern what happens to that money after they fork it over.

Maybe people would view it more like that if they actually had the option to get paid cash instead of an insurance plan of the same supposed value. With some employees that is possible to negotiate, but for the vast majority of employees with a healthcare plan that is a big no unless they are willing to accept a tiny fraction of the insurance value.

> You shouldn't.

The correct number to use is called "total employee compensation". This includes:

1. salary

2. paid days off

3. health care benefits

4. retirement benefits

5. employer 401k contributions

6. incentive stock plans

7. taxes paid on behalf of the employee (such as the so-called employer's contribution to social security)

8. free food in the company cafeteria

9. any other benefits that cost money

The cost to employers for these benefits adds about 30% to total employee compensation.

Having an office for them to work at is also important and costs money.

That's true, but I only listed things that are part of employee compensation.

Employers paid for healthcare in 1970s too, and even for higher percentages of the workforce. If there is a premium inflation surpassed the CPI, that is still inflation, not real growth. If there’s an inflation problem in delivering a temporally comparable service, that is not a “real wage” item for the employee [1]. So what the nominal figure today shouldn’t be relevant.

I agree it shouldn’t be an employer item too, but whatever employers lose on premiums, they get more on an overall stickier and cheaper labor supply.

[1] one could argue the productivity of healthcare increased, and the data indeed supports this with the overall life expectancy increase from 70s to now mid 70s plus quality of life treatments. But again most of the spend is actually on the tail end at this age group, which raises the workers’ premium without delivering the benefit. Therefore not much structural gain for the actual working age employee.

I don't understand your point. Very few people in their 70s have employer sponsored group health insurance. Most are only on Medicare, perhaps with a commercial Medicare Advantage or Medicare Supplement plan.

My bad, skipped a chain of thought there. Since medicare pays less than private insurance, hospitals can and do shift costs (which in reality is "opportunity cost of profit") to the latter, which pushes to private premiums up. Regardless, this is a minor effect. Very little of the inflation is justified with productivity gains, as you said it is a very inefficient healthcare system. US prices clock 2x-4x of comparable OPEC peers, admin percent is higher etc.

Adam Smith and old school Capitalism hate rent seeking though, and when does moving all jobs to AI companies become rent seeking? It definitely destroys the labor/capital relationship part of Capitalism, but it's goal is to also turn the entire economy into rent seeking. Something considered very bad in traditional Capitalist thought. The current path has basically the total destruction of actual Capitalist thought at it's heart.

The problem is that libertarians have been able to retcon their fan fiction into what Capitalism is and gloss over the original anti-rent seeking, anti-monopoly, pro-government oversight parts that Capitalism REQUIRES in order to stay healthy,functioning, and beneficial to society. And people just accept that 'capitalism good' = 'late 20th/early 21st century libertarian fanfiction of what capitalism is' is the definition of Capitalism, when it is very far from it and has zero relation to the functional Capitalism that lifted the world up.

Combining this late 20th/early 21st century fanfiction version of Capitalism with the current tech company goals for AI is something totally new, zero percent Capitalism, and 100% would be hated by original Capitalist thinkers as damaging.

What if I build and manage a dark factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)) and it produces gizmos.

Since all my competitors are also running dark factories, we compete essentially on source materials + energy (assuming we have similar design/quality). Margin would be eventually razor thin. The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second.

The capital gain is not much , but since we have only a handful of employees, that is enough to pay everyone a decent wage, after paying for the factory itself, source materials and energy.

How much tax do we expect to get from this gizmo company ? 10 years ago, to produce the same gizmos, I needed 5,000 employees, the unit price was way higher, and had higher revenue. But since AI and dark factories came, the prices cratered, instead of 5,000 jobs, we only have 5 jobs to produce the same.

Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is paying for their health benefits and social security (retirement) ?

I am wondering how best to solve that equation ?

Who buys what you make if you need no employees?

Now that jacquard loom has left so many textile workers unemployed?

We've launched dozens of shuttles below the minimum temp threshold before there's no reason to delay this launch...

Also that's a singular industry, if the current crop of AI companies deliver what their hype and valuation demands it's a shock across the whole economy not isolated.

> Also that's a singular industry

200 years ago, 95% of the workers in my country worked in subsistence farming. Today, only 2% are farmers. The whole spectrum of labor has turned upside down and upside down again, in that time. It has certainly not been a singular industry.

There is no guarantee that this pattern will continue and that capitalism will always make enough good jobs for everyone who loses jobs to automation.

There is likewise no indication that it won't. And if I am looking at a pattern where a thousand careers were destroyed by the advance of technology and were swiftly replaced by tens of thousands of new ones, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the pattern is likely repeat.

My job title did not even exist when I was born.

Do you think that the velocity of change is different from previously ?

I am wondering if we are touching on a human biological limitation. Human are adaptable and flexible, but there is a limit to that flexibility. Some sort of biological limit on how fast we can turn around.

The technology acceleration is increasing, and I am wondering if there would be a point where the technology would evolve faster than what human biology can comprehend.

1,000 years ago, anyone could pretty much build or fix the current technology (anyone could fix a cart). 50 years ago, a majority of people could build or fix the current technology (e.g. most could fix a car). this year, a limited number of people can build or fix the current technology (e.g. how many people can fix a self driving car?) 10 years from now, a very limited number of people if any could build or fix the current technology (e.g. explain how is AI doing this thing?)

If AI evolves at the same pace, and replacing labor (robots) and services (AI), I am not sure that human would turn around? How do you think we can turn things around ?

Education ? but we are reaching the limit already of how much technology we can teach in a student lifetime. Now we could argue, that one does not need a PhD in computer science to use AI, but eventually do we even need someone to use AI ? Would AI be cheap and pervasive enough that AI would drive AI would drive AI... why would you add a 20W analog brain in the loop ?

What activity would require human involvement ? Genuinely curious how the technology acceleration in general and AI in particular would affect the economy.

> If AI evolves at the same pace, and replacing labor (robots) and services (AI), I am not sure that human would turn around? How do you think we can turn things around ?

I see no indication that we are close to building a GAI, or that we are close to solving the hallucination problems that severely limit the utility LLMs without human managers. We don't understand how our own intelligence works, or even an ant's. The notion the we are close to replicating or exceeding it seems far fetched to me.

> What activity would require human involvement ?

Nurses, bar tenders, barbers... Hasn't anyone read Player Piano? :)

> How do you think we can turn things around ?

I dunno. Did anyone know how dangerous fire or deadly spear points world work out?

It was a bunch of small changes over the course of 200 years but yes that's perfectly comparible to the effects needed to justify the valuation put into all the AI companies right now... but I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom that DO largely only affect one industry.

I think it's weird there's so much pushback on the idea that if the hype proves true and it /can/ replace basically any knowledge worker (and potentially drive robots replacing physical laborers) that that would have a bit of a larger effect than inventions that affect some parts of some industries...

There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions) but if it does work the broad spread of the impact would require a huge amount of change all at once.

> I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom

Ok, appreciate the clarification. But in that time frame there have been a number of really tectonic inventions that changed pretty much everything: steam power, ICE power, electrification, refrigeration, computing and the internet, just to name a few off the top of my head.

> There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions)

Same. I am both optimistic about human ability to find new jobs, and skeptical that "AI" is going to make that necessary in the new future.

That amount of change over 200 years is vastly different from the supposed timeline for AI to 'change everything' is the core of the difference. Over that long there's time for people to retrain into other jobs and there's enough people not significantly affected by the change that society as a whole can roll on and support the affected people. Mass disruption and joblessness is extremely destabilizing.

I get what you are saying, and I don't think you are wrong, but it has been like 100 monumental changes in 200 years. The demographic shift of the industrial revolution was particularly painful, to be sure. But we seem to be pretty good at coping with them, overall.

And again, I remain skeptical that general artificial intelligence is actually that close at hand.

> 200 years ago, 95% of the workers in my country worked in subsistence farming. Today, only 2% are farmers.

Yes, it took some time to go from manual/animal labor (energy used is food) to mechanical labor (mostly oil energy). And oil is more energy dense than food, and tractors are more powerful than horses. And bonus points for the oil, it allowed to build fertilizers to boost productivity per acre. So, yes eventually we just need 2% to do what what 95% used to do in farming.

AI is promising to do the same but in virtually all industries (manufacturing, services, healthcare, etc.) and in a way shorten span.

Work used to be labor (human/animal) fueled by energy (food) + intelligence (human) fueled by energy (food), then labor (machine) fueled by energy (oil/electricity) + intelligence (AI) fueled by energy (electricity).

IF work is mostly done by AI/machines fueled by energy. Then work's price is mostly a function of energy price (assuming materials can be extracted/transported/transformed is also a function of energy).

If energy becomes abundant and cheap, then there is no reasons to not let AI do the work.

But then what happens to the rest of us, how the economy keeps humming ?

Not 100% of the employees work on manufacturing, and it would crater the price of the products, so some should be able to buy ?

> The dark factory does not make much capital gains, even as it produces 1,000 gizmo per second.

But that's good, right? It means that the difference between what workers get paid when they do work and what they pay when they buy things is small.

> Sure the 4,995 unemployed might be able to afford the gizmo, but the state does not receive the same taxes. So what happens to those 4,995 unemployed people ? who is paying for their health benefits and social security (retirement) ?

Let's consider the two possibilities here.

The first is that we automate everything. This is implausible, but let's consider what would happen. Well then necessities would be free, because there is no labor cost to produce arbitrarily many solar panels or skyscrapers or mine asteroids to get unlimited raw materials etc. So then you don't need taxes because nothing costs anything.

The second is that there is still work you need people to do, and then they do that, and still have jobs.

And the more stuff you do automate, the less expensive it is to produce things, and the less assistance anyone needs to afford the now-lower cost of necessities. So if you get halfway between one and two then that's still fine because costs go down in proportion to the lower demand for labor.

The real problem is if the cost of necessities are held artificially scarce through regulatory capture and zoning rules. But that's not an automation problem, that's a government problem.

My problem is when you automate, the benefits are not passed on to the entire chain of people involved even though we start the discussion with that. So what do we do?

In a competitive market, efficiency gains are generally going to end up as lower prices to the customer, which is the main way that ordinary people benefit from them. That doesn't happen when the market is consolidated and the oligopoly keeps the gains themselves.

So, ensure competitive markets by thwarting regulatory capture and enforcing antitrust laws.

Yes, that has been the rule for now. But I am wondering that if the prices drop so much, but the price to pay for that abundance would be the loss of significant part of job market, then how can we keep the economy humming ?

We would need to find a way to give money to people so they can keep participating in the economy even though everything is cheap. If not UBI, we would need to find ways for the majority to do something that is not automated, and give them some coins in exchange.

For millennia the currency has been energy (human labor, then machines) and intelligence (human intelligence, then artificial intelligence). If energy and intelligence price goes down, and the amount of energy and intelligence increases, then what is left for humans to claim some reward/coins ?

> But I am wondering that if the prices drop so much, but the price to pay for that abundance would be the loss of significant part of job market, then how can we keep the economy humming ?

Money is an abstraction, so prices are always relative to wages. If prices go down, that's equivalent to wages going up. If your costs are $1000 and your wages are $1000, that's the same to you as if your costs are $100 and your wages are $100.

So the problem solves itself. You previously needed a job that would pay you $1000 to cover your costs, now you only need one that pays $100. And there is still $100 of work that needs to be done, because that's why things cost $100 instead of $0.

I agree, so the prices of everything would go down. People would be unemployed. Do we plan to give some money to pay for basic stuff (food, shelter) ?

Even if the cost for food and shelter is $1 per month, if there is no revenue, it is still too expensive, right ?

I am trying to understand the speed comparison between how fast the prices will go down, vs. how fast people will lose their jobs. If job loss goes faster than the price decrease, we might have a problem to solve.

> Even if the cost for food and shelter is $1 per month, if there is no revenue, it is still too expensive, right ?

Why would there be no revenue? Right now you need a job that pays at least e.g. $2500/month to afford basic necessities. If those jobs disappear but the cost falls to $1/month, you don't need those jobs, because a job that pays $3/month leaves you in fat city, much less one that pays $50/month.

> If job loss goes faster than the price decrease, we might have a problem to solve.

That would be a transient problem while the prices catch up, not a long-term problem. You could solve that by e.g. printing some money in the short term.

But if we fully automate how to make and sell and deliver TVs and blenders and now I can get a 200" TV for $2 and a blender for $0.05 but now I don't have a job so I can't afford even a basic apartment what do we do with our society?

Like sure all the goods are stupid cheap but things that are actually naturally rivalrous and exclusive like real estate continue to hold value most random people are pretty fucked it seems.

> but now I don't have a job so I can't afford even a basic apartment what do we do with our society?

Apartments aren't land, they're buildings. Buildings can be made arbitrarily tall; if we built tall buildings we'd have more housing units than people long before we ran out of land.

So if there is a machine that can build buildings for free, apartments should be cheap. If there isn't a machine that can build buildings for free, get a job building buildings for money.

Not really worry about having enough land.

Even if 100% automated, there might still be a residual cost to building as it needs energy (assuming than raw material is free). I do not think that because the building would be not free, it would allow human to compete (too slow, inaccurate, etc.)

> But if we fully automate how to make and sell and deliver TVs and blenders and now I can get a 200" TV for $2 and a blender for $0.05 but now I don't have a job so I can't afford even a basic apartment what do we do with our society?

Delivery should be automated.

Rent would obviously crater as building housing craters too (robots making it, materials being extracted and manufactured by robots too). But again, it would still cost something (energy at very least and assuming energy is not free).

So I suspect that even if 100% is automated, we would still need little money to pay for the basics (food, shelter).

There is only so much land where people actually want to live. Governments put restrictions on what can be built. It might end up costing $20 to build a 100-story apartment complex, but if the government says buildings can only be five stories high or you have to only build single family homes it doesn't matter.

> It might end up costing $20 to build a 100-story apartment complex, but if the government says buildings can only be five stories high or you have to only build single family homes it doesn't matter.

And that's the point. The problem isn't caused by automation, it's caused by zoning restrictions.

The problem with that is that it operates from a wrong idea of how to set prices for a product. From first principles, you make a widget, figure out how much it costs to make it, including your time, then add some amount of margin on top, and you have a business. That is incorrect. No, you have product, and then you just make up a number based on circumstances. If you're lucky, the price you manage to sell your widget for is above what it costs to make it. If you're not lucky, it isn't, and you have a sale, and lose less money than if you didn't sell anything. However, if you're lucky, you sell your widget for way more than it costs to make it, because of branding, aka luxury fashion brands. The numbers though, are just made up. That's the trick of capitalism. You just... make up a number! Once you understand that, the world starts to make even less sense than it did before. If pricing were cost-plus, branding and timing wouldn’t matter, and empirically they matter a lot.

You're describing what happens in uncompetitive markets (or for status goods, which have inherently weird behavior because they're a signaling mechanism that relies on waste and artificial scarcity as a mechanism of operation, but also inherently nobody actually needs them).

In an ordinary competitive market, margins are thin because sellers are fungible, so charging slightly less than the competition results in a disproportionate increase in sales because customers are just choosing the lowest price, and then sellers keep lowering prices until margins are thin because it's more profitable to get a $0.05 margin on a thousand units than a $0.10 margin on a dozen units.

This assumes income still exists.

Automation drives goods toward zero while destroying the wage base, as Ricardo warned: gains flow to owners (das capital) of scarce resources. Today that’s Ricardian rents on land, housing, zoning, healthcare, education. $2 TVs ain't gonna pay rent.

Antitrust decides who captures surplus, not how people access it once wages stop working. And UBI would just be stapling cash onto a broken distribution system. So what actually replaces labor as the primary claim on surplus?

The only truly scarce things are time and energy/matter. Everything else can be made from those.

Labor is essentially the sale of time. If labor becomes cheaper then energy/matter becomes the bottleneck. Except that there is actually quite a bit of energy and matter in the universe and the main bottleneck on collecting more of it is labor, so if labor gets cheaper then so does energy and matter.

The things you're pointing to are the things that are artificially scarce. How expensive is a housing unit if you can build a 100 story building on any lot and the labor to do that is cheap? Now how expensive is it if building tall buildings is banned and there is an intentional regulatory bottleneck on more people getting trade licenses?

If you still need human labor to build housing then people can get jobs building housing until housing gets cheap. If you don't need human labor to build housing then housing would already be cheap. Unless you have the government artificially constraining the housing supply, in which case you need to fix that. And the same thing for medicine and education.

> Unless you have the government artificially constraining the housing supply, in which case you need to fix that. And the same thing for medicine and education.

That is the meat of it. Zoning laws are why every city doesn't look like Hong Kong, even if it cost $1 to make a sky scraper. There are artificial limits on supply of doctors, and we don't pay teachers enough which is a whole other topic. If that's what we have to fix in order to make progress, I'm suddenly doubtful of how much progress will really be made in the face of the singularity.

> Zoning laws are why every city doesn't look like Hong Kong

The reason every city doesn't look like Hong Kong is that Hong Kong has a population of 7.5 million and a US city is considered "large" if it has 50,000 people.

Zoning laws are why every city doesn't look like Lubbock or Boise, which is hardly a problem.

> If that's what we have to fix in order to make progress

That's what we have to fix in order to make progress. It is what it is.

> The first is that we automate everything. This is implausible, but let's consider what would happen. Well then necessities would be free, because there is no labor cost to produce arbitrarily many solar panels or skyscrapers or mine asteroids to get unlimited raw materials etc. So then you don't need taxes because nothing costs anything.

Well, you still have to pay for the energy (to extract raw material and transform it into final product, and move final product into your hands). So unless we assume energy cost is 0 and raw materials are not scarce, the final product has a cost, and a price, now my understanding is that if everyone uses dark factories, the margin would go down, and so the gain per "company" would drop too, hence the limited tax base.

My guess is from the 2 ends of the spectrum that you listed, we are moving from "there is still work you need people to do, and then they do that, and still have jobs." to "we automate everything". And as we move to the "we automate everything" end of the spectrum, the number of jobs lost would increase, the taxes collected (VAT, income, capital gain, etc.) would decrease (assuming the current tax system) and yet people (employed or not) would still education, health care, social security (retirement).

If we do not change how we tax things, I do not see how we would sustain a society where the majority is materially (gizmos) rich, but financially poor (no job, no retirement, no social security, no education).

While dark factories keep producing high volume of gizmos for next to nothing...

I am curious how we can manage that transition, which I believe could happen way faster than politicians can move.

> Well, you still have to pay for the energy (to extract raw material and transform it into final product, and move final product into your hands).

But then you're back to having something that isn't automated. If machines do this then it's free. If you need people to do it then people have jobs.

> And as we move to the "we automate everything" end of the spectrum, the number of jobs lost would increase, the taxes collected (VAT, income, capital gain, etc.) would decrease (assuming the current tax system) and yet people (employed or not) would still education, health care, social security (retirement).

But things would also cost less, in the same proportion.

Suppose healthcare is 20% of the economy, can't be automated, and we automate everything else. Then tax revenue goes down by 80%, but so do costs, so people only need 20% as much in government services or those services only cost 20% as much to provide.

Meanwhile you still need people to be doctors and nurses but not other things, so more people become doctors and nurses. This drives down wages there, but that's fine when the doctors and nurses are also paying 80% less for everything. And at the lower wages you can justify more work to be done. More people do medical research, doctors get to spend more time with each patient, etc. Soon everyone has a job again.

Let's even consider the hypothetical where that can't happen. There are 8 billion people and only a million jobs. No other jobs are possible, somehow. How much are those million people going to get paid? Peanuts, because like everyone else they'd have negligible living expenses and they'd be in competition with 8 billion people for who would be willing to do it for the least amount of compensation. Their payment would be something like bragging rights, or all the slots would be filled by volunteers.

But in practice we would never "run out" of jobs because the supply curve always intersects with the demand curve somewhere. If demand goes down then price goes down because there is higher demand at the lower price.

> > Well, you still have to pay for the energy (to extract raw material and transform it into final product, and move final product into your hands). > But then you're back to having something that isn't automated. If machines do this then it's free. If you need people to do it then people have jobs.

Not sure to follow, machines need energy as input. So unless energy is free and unlimited, even if the machines run without people, there is a cost for the products. It is not free, even if that is 100% automated. At the very least you have to pay for the energy, if not for the raw materials.

> > And as we move to the "we automate everything" end of the spectrum, the number of jobs lost would increase, the taxes collected (VAT, income, capital gain, etc.) would decrease (assuming the current tax system) and yet people (employed or not) would still education, health care, social security (retirement). > But things would also cost less, in the same proportion.

Yes, things (material) and services would cost less. But still cost the energy to produce those things and services.

> Suppose healthcare is 20% of the economy, can't be automated, and we automate everything else. Then tax revenue goes down by 80%, but so do costs, so people only need 20% as much in government services or those services only cost 20% as much to provide.

Not sure why healthcare would not be 100% automated, but for the exercise, let's assume it still needs some people. Unless you also assume that unemployed people could get some ABI or SNAP from government (in US already 1 out 8 adult receives SNAP) to pay for food (cost less with 100% automation, but still cost the energy for fertilizer, tractors, transport, transformation), for shelter, etc. and pay for healthcare.

I am not sure if the gov lose 80% of its tax collection, it could sustain the population basic needs.

> Meanwhile you still need people to be doctors and nurses but not other things, so more people become doctors and nurses.

Not sure why we need doctors or nurses ? Doctors are mostly a sensor + decision tree... that speaks to the patient. I could see doctors and nurses to disappear eventually. It might take longer for robots to do surgery, but it should eventually come. So the cost should drop. Drugs manufacturing should be 100% automated too. Lab work automated.

> This drives down wages there, but that's fine when the doctors and nurses are also paying 80% less for everything. And at the lower wages you can justify more work to be done. More people do medical research, doctors get to spend more time with each patient, etc. Soon everyone has a job again. Let's even consider the hypothetical where that can't happen. There are 8 billion people and only a million jobs. No other jobs are possible, somehow. How much are those million people going to get paid? Peanuts, because like everyone else they'd have negligible living expenses and they'd be in competition with 8 billion people for who would be willing to do it for the least amount of compensation. Their payment would be something like bragging rights, or all the slots would be filled by volunteers. But in practice we would never "run out" of jobs because the supply curve always intersects with the demand curve somewhere. If demand goes down then price goes down because there is higher demand at the lower price.

I guess the disconnect, for me the end of spectrum, is that all the products and services could eventually be 100% automated without human in the loop, expect for consuming the products/services. Those 100% automated product manufacturing or services, would cost energy (electricity basically) and raw material (arguably free, just need to pick it up on the ground using some energy). So, one machine would build everything and all services, with just energy as input. If energy is not free, then products and services would cost something. How people pay for product and services ?

> Not sure to follow, machines need energy as input. So unless energy is free and unlimited, even if the machines run without people, there is a cost for the products.

But where does energy come from? You would have machines that can make solar panels and install them and operate a power grid, or people would still have jobs doing those things.

> Unless you also assume that unemployed people could get some ABI or SNAP from government (in US already 1 out 8 adult receives SNAP) to pay for food (cost less with 100% automation, but still cost the energy for fertilizer, tractors, transport, transformation), for shelter, etc. and pay for healthcare.

If everything other than healthcare was automated then energy production, fertilizer production, tractor production, transportation, etc. would all be automated.

If everything is automated then everything is free. If there is still anything that can't be automated then people still have jobs doing that.

So are we're simultaneously facing a big unemployment crisis, and a big shortage of health care providers and retirement care takers?

One could argue that AI could replace or add to the health and retirement care work force... I am not saying it should happen, but I am trying to understand where we are going with the AI promises, and their impact on society.

If AI is so good that it can replace health and retirement care, then the price should fall to.

But basically, we would end up with AI and dark factories building gizmos to sustain and entertain humans and fixing them until they die.

I guess taxes at this point are irrelevant, AI could build new factories of factories, money would be useless.

Taxes used to be based only on property rather than labour, maybe we should go back to that. Of course this won't happen as it is a force of wealth-deconcentration.

By property you mean land property only or any possession (capital) ?

States not being able to regulate this is dangerous. A close friend of mine has given up on reality and talks about Roberto the love of her life the one she always wanted and Roberto is chatGPT :-(. She previously mentioned she didnt like chatGPT 5.0 cause it wasnt as agreeable yet now she says 5.1 is better.. back to how it was before 5.0 and now out of the blue mentioned Roberto.

chatGPT is a sypcophant and without regulation any AI company can and or will juice their algorithms so their AI system becomes cocaine for the millions of lonely to unsatisfied people out there.

My friend has a partner of 30 years but their relationship is that of roommates. If you think she is not you that might be correct but you know someone like her and possibly many like her. Unsatisfied, not able to get that movie type love / romance / fantasy and now unfetterd AI can get these people hooked like cocaine and into the depth of zero reality!

I dunno--of all the AI based products coming out, the whole "AI girlfriend / AI boyfriend" thing bothers me the least. If someone can afford it and they want a play relationship with a computer, then I don't see the harm. It's probably safer, better and healthier than many real-human relationships are. If they're getting what they need out of the computer, who are we to judge?

I would change my opinion if it could be shown to have the negative physical harm that your cocaine example implies.

The problem is when things like this happens: https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...

When AI behaves sycohphantically towards someone, it can encourage and exacerbate any mental health problems they may already be having, especially related to social isolation.

That's indeed a problem. Thanks for bringing it up. These things clearly are not as harmless as I had assumed.

The issue isn't in the individual but at scale, what % of our population are we okay with separating with reality? What secondary effects of that inability to live in reality will show their heads? What will politics look like when everything can be made up and treated as equal to reality?

What will the mental health of society start to look like if every person who's on the edge has a computer to tell them they're totally correct and everyone else are haters?

That's a non sequitur. Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it. Often the "cure" is worse than the disease and the last thing we need is more intrusive government power.

Just because something is dangerous doesn't mean that governments should be able to regulate it.

That is...literally the point of government...

If you meant, that something shouldn't be banned just because it is dangerous, most people would agree with you. But almost everyone would agree that regulation of dangerous things is essential.

No, that's incorrect. You appear to have made a category error. Regulating dangerous things is not the point of government. Please review the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

No, that's incorrect. You appear to have made a basic error. Regulating dangerous things is part of the point of government. Please review the U.S. Constitution.

The preamble of the U.S. Constitution literally states that part of its purpose is to..."promote the general Welfare."

That's not what they meant by "welfare".

There is over 250 years of legislative history indicating that regulating dangerous things is part of promoting the public welfare.

Literally, the First Congress made up almost entirely of Founding Fathers passed laws regulating dangerous things...

If you want to use a nonstandard definition to suit your own ideology you're free to do so but don't expect others to join you.

It is already taxed as capital gains though. Software (including AI), if sold either in isolation or with the entire company does trigger capital gains considerations.

If you're referring to some equivalent of wealth tax or inverse of accounting for deprecations in terms of assets, then that seems pretty problematic. 1) how do you asset the value of something until someone pays something for it? Unlike homes, where you can compare roughly to those around you, this seems much more dynamic for software / AI. 2) Let's say we are able to assess the value, so now a startup with software but no revenue has to pay taxes? Where does the money come from?

its not in the convo because these capital high intensities are the ones lobbying and owning the politicians. they're each other friends. taxes were always intended even in this country to be a thing applied to serfdom: we weren't in reality immune from the conditions we aimed to flee from Great Britain where kings and queens gained qualified immunity and sovereign status - sometimes it seems like are just a "free" slave nation.

What is the correct capital gains tax rate?

100%

Why should capital have a separate tax rate than people?

Also, if companies have rights like people do, then they and their shareholders should be taxed like people are.

You want to tax people twice?

Corporations pay taxes on profit. Shareholders pay taxes on dividends and capital gains.

Sure. Why not? We already get taxed multiple ways. I pay income tax and sales tax

Do I get a refund the next year when the stock drops due to an executive scandal?

No but you can use the loss to offset other gains. Just like you do today. There's nothing new there. Google tax loss harvesting

> We already get taxed multiple ways. I pay income tax and sales tax

Shouldn't we also not do that?

Suppose you pay a 25% income tax and then a 10% sales tax. You're paying the same amount, almost a third of your income, as you would with a 47% sales tax. Which to begin with misleads people into thinking their rate is lower than it is, and on top of that incurs the significant overhead of needing two independent collection infrastructures.

Why isn't it better to just pick one?

> Suppose you pay a 25% income tax and then a 10% sales tax. You're paying the same amount, almost a third of your income, as you would with a 47% sales tax.

No, I don't, because I don't spend 100% of my income every year on income-tax applicable goods. A good chunk of my income, even that which is taxed with income tax, goes to other things (like my mortgage, other investments, groceries, savings accounts, charitable donations, etc.) that either defer paying sales taxes or have no sales tax applied.

Meanwhile other purchases have extra sales taxes applied such a liquor or hospitality taxes.

Obviously the hypothetical is assuming a uniform 10% sales tax, but what's your point? If you had a 20% sales tax on accommodations then incorporating a 25% income tax into it would make it a 60% sales tax. If you wanted to continue omitting the existing sales tax contribution to groceries but apply the income tax portion you could use 33% instead of 47% and so on.

My point is some people spend all their money on sales tax applicable things while others don't spend all their income. So those who don't spend all their money get to avoid those taxes on some percentage of their invome, potentially indefinitely.

Think for a second. What kind of household spends every penny they make? Which one maybe manages to toss some money into savings every month? Which one doesn't even come close to spending their income?

Which household here pays the highest effective tax rate?

Which still doesn't have anything to do with whether it's income or sales tax. If someone has some money they're not intending to spend anytime soon then they put it into a 401k to defer the taxes, or any of a dozen other things that have a similar result.

Sure it does. There are caps to those tax advantaged savings accounts. There's no cap on not spending money.

You're still designing a system where the highest effective tax rates are paid by the lowest income people and the lowest effective tax rates are paid by the highest income people. You've pointed to nothing that changes this truth.

> There are caps to those tax advantaged savings accounts.

Caps that are set to the amounts where people start having enough money to hire a tax accountant and thereby use the various other ways of deferring income tax on money you're not immediately spending.

> You're still designing a system where the highest effective tax rates are paid by the lowest income people and the lowest effective tax rates are paid by the highest income people.

The status quo is even worse: They not only defer income tax on the money they're not spending, they defer it on money they are spending, by borrowing against the assets and spending the loan. Which a consumption tax would have them paying.

Meanwhile you can exempt necessities from a consumption tax to various degrees or issue a large fixed tax credit to everyone, which lowers the effective rate on ordinary people by as much as you like.

> Obviously the hypothetical is assuming a uniform 10% sales tax

> Meanwhile you can exempt necessities from a consumption tax to various degrees

So, a non-uniform sales tax. So not the thing you were arguing for just a few comments ago.

It's unfortunate, but corporations moving to nations with lower corporate rates could reduce overall revenue if the domestic rates are too aggressive. In many ways it's easier to corporations to change nations than citizens.

Ban corporations that do this from selling in your domestic market.

Fine. What should that rate be?

Variable, based on the household and the amount of income being taxed.

So make capital gains rates match existing income tax rates?

Seems sensible. I remember when W reduced capital gains rates. I think they used to be closer.

How to say that you don't understand taxation without saying you don't understand taxation.

So the remaining 3 workers will be paying 100% of tax. Doesn’t seem fair to me.

I'm not sure I'm following your thought on capital gains tax.

Capital Gain tax occurs when you sell an asset for more than you paid for it.

AI (software) is not an asset, and I'm not sure how you'd sell it. Computers and robots are assets (although they typically depreciate not appreciate.)

Either way capital gains tax is applied to the asset not the productivity of the asset. The productivity in turn is taxed as part of income tax.

Perhaps I have misunderstood your point though?

The ownership of software absolutely is an asset. It’s Intellectual Property. What are you referring to?

They’re referring to the comment that they’re replying to, which talks about capital gains tax in an entirely different context to how you referenced software ownership.

If a business invests in building an AI system, they now have an asset, and the value of the business reflects the fact the business owns that software asset now - if someone were to buy the business they would get the AI software and all its potential to monetize that asset in the future, so of course it has value.

If its value grows beyond the value the business originally invested to acquire it, it is quite literally a capital gain.

Why do you think Anthropic is worth $175-$350bn? Where did that capital value come from?

Yes, that’s how a software business works. The OP seemed to be talking about how we need to reform tax due to worker replacement. Everyone is talking past each other.

Correct, building an AI is an asset, which can then be rented to other businesses.

However the thread revolves around employers replacing employees with AI. Given that the number of AI creators is minimal, and the number of companies replacing employees is large, it follows that most companies replacing employees are renting AI, they did not create it.

Hence, for those companies, AI is not an asset, it is an expense.

One way of taxing those companies would be to tax AI producers based on revenue, not profits. If 50% of revenue was tax, then, the costs of AI to the end-user would go up to cover that. So revenue would "double", but half would go to govt.

I am not a tax lawyer though, but I expect such a scheme is so radically different to the current tax regime, that is has precisely zero chance of being implemented like this.

> One way of taxing those companies would be to tax AI producers based on revenue, not profits.

Why?

I guess to put AI vendors on an equal footing with human intelligence vendors (ie humans). Workers are taxed on their revenue - their gross earnings - not their profits.

If the point is to tax AI consumers then AI providers can collect that tax on behalf of the IRS.

Taxing the profit of AI companies is useless since profit is a number that is easily manipulated to 0. Taxing revenue is much more direct. Prices have to go up to cover the tax. Hence the consumer oays "more" and that more is passed onto the tax man.

Taxing profit is exactly why businesses pay so little tax - it's trivial to make "no profit". (For example if the IP is held in another jurisdiction with a lower tax rate, and is "licensed" by the company which wants to make no profit. )

Aren’t we then just nullifying the productivity gains that could be had from the technology though? Obviously some people want this, they want AI to be less competitive with human labour, but don’t we just fall behind other nations who don’t tax that way and allow maximum productivity gains in all the AI consuming businesses?

Which other countries exactly?

Of course businesses have always leased equipment to reduce the need for labor. This isn’t materially any different than paying your neighbor to borrow his ox and plow so you only need one guy to work your field instead of three.

Honestly? Marketing and investment overreaction.

What is it capable of generating in real profits? Yet to be seen.

> The ownership of software absolutely is an asset

It's a good thing we give the D compiler system away for free! You don't have to be concerned about being taxed on it.

If your brokerage account is large enough that most of your change-in-net-worth happens in unrealized capital gains, your tax rate is 0%. That's pathological at the best of times and in a "capital wins" scenario it's positively thermonuclear.

Folks like to hate on capital gains tax. I think it's perceived as a rich-person deal. But homeowners, do they get taxed each year on the increase in value of their house? Almost the same thing, but not hated on the same way.

Homeowners get taxed every year on the value of their property. Let's do that to stocks, too.

I think both stocks and homes should be taxed on realized value. If you sell it, that realizes the value, but also if you use it as collateral, that realizes the value. If you just live in it, we could say that it realizes the amount of rent you would have paid, or that it realizes nothing.

No, the exponential runaway of "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" is the core problem and focusing on the derivative is a magic trick intended primarily to draw attention away from the core problem.

The fact that an earned derivative gets heavily taxed and an unearned derivative gets lightly taxed is so stupendously wacky that the absurdity is obvious, but the integral is the core problem.

If you mean the difference between the top line capital gains vs income tax rates, I generally agree but also understand the math does not.

You could reset realized long term capital gains taxes to match income tomorrow and it would not be a huge material difference in the budget. I am 100% for doing this anyways simply because it’s fucking absurd any professional W2 employee is paying more percentage in taxes vs someone who just happens to have idle cash at hand - but it’s more of a “social contract” thing for me than actual tax policy.

The issue really is tax deferral strategies and wealthy folks being able to consistently find strategies to roll over investment dollars into new investments without ever having their gains be subject to pretty much any tax. Stuff like stock buybacks, tax loss harvesting, 1031 exchanges etc.

I don’t think the “loans against a stock portfolio” tax dodge thing is nearly as large as social media decided to pretend it is - but I am very much in favor of taxing any realized value at regular capital gains rates at the time of realization. This means you will probably need to sell a bit of an asset to pay the taxes - which is the entire point.

Unrealized gains are tricky. I’ve been in a situation as a bootstrapped startup founder where I owed “phantom” tax on money I had not yet realized and ended up taking a loss on years later. Zero ability to recover those taxes paid. It put me into a hole for over half a decade. This gives huge preference to those with existing wealth and makes it even harder for someone with nothing to “come up” without handing out a majority share of their company/idea to idle capital. Especially if you’re just doing regular economy things to create a small business doing boring stuff at single digit net margins.

The common theme behind the avoidance mechanisms is "keeping the gain unrealized." Going after preferential treatment of unrealized gains categorically attacks every single one of these tricks. It nukes the hydra rather than trying to chop off heads one at a time.

I am of course deeply sympathetic to the "founder scenario," but I'd rather address it specifically than hobble tax collection generally. This could be done by a "payment in-kind" mechanism. If we wanted to steer it towards startups I'm sure the valuation rules could be set to do so, but I'd personally like to aim higher and go for progressive taxation on the basis of market cap to encourage company splitting and competition. Industries with the most dramatic returns-to-scale (semiconductors) could be exempted.

That said, the (in)ability for new founders to self-fund is deeply tied to the same gini coefficient story as the rest of the economy, so policy that addresses the gini story should help bootstrappers as well.

> Going after preferential treatment of unrealized gains categorically attacks every single one of these tricks. It nukes the hydra rather than trying to chop off heads one at a time.

Now think about how they're going to respond to it.

A major problem with taxing unrealized gains is how to measure them. For publicly traded companies that's pretty easy -- the stock is undergoing regular market transactions so you have a pretty good idea about the price. But what about assets that aren't? Closely held private companies that aren't listed on an exchange and haven't undergone any stock transactions in ten years. Art. The value -- or liability -- of a private contract for the future sale of goods at a defined price, when the market value of those goods might have since changed, or depending on what they are, be indeterminate.

It creates endless opportunities for playing games, and that complexity is exactly what allows the people who can afford fancy accountants to pay less in tax than everybody else. If you want to fix it you need to make the system simpler rather than even more complicated.

IIRC one of the Scandinavian nations has solved this with property taxes: you self-declare the value of your property, but the state has the right to buy it at that price.

Keeps people honest (enough).

That only seems like a solution until the loophole-finders get on with their jobs.

Suppose you own a company and you have a trusted friend. The company, not the owner, enters into a contract with the friend that gives them the right to buy all the company's assets for 1% of their value, if the friend can satisfy a condition that they could only satisfy with the cooperation of the existing owner. Then the owner declares that the company is only worth 2% of its ordinary value -- which might even be an overestimate given the risk that the friend could execute the contract. If the government exercises the option to buy the company, they get a company bound to an obligation to sell all its assets to the friend, and then the previous owner cooperates in satisfying the condition in exchange for the friend giving them the assets back.

"We'll ban that", you say. But then they'll be more subtle about it, and the only way to really catch them is to have a good way of determining the true value of the company, which was the original problem.

You also run into trouble with that one because people can play that game the other way. You have an asset which on paper should be worth around a million dollars, but its value has already been hollowed out or de facto assigned to someone else without actually transferring the asset. Then the owner declares that it's worth $400,000 and the government pays them $400,000 thinking they're going to make $600,000, only to find out that it's actually worthless.

> The fact that an earned derivative gets heavily taxed and an unearned derivative gets lightly taxed is so stupendously wacky that the absurdity is obvious, but the integral is the core problem.

The fact is that we have no problems with taxing consumption (billionaire buys yacht) but we have an extremely sensible aversion to taxing money spent on productive investment (company pays to build new factory). So business expenses are tax deductions.

The sensible way to handle this is to just use VAT, but then people say "what if they reinvest everything into new ventures and stop buying yachts"? The answer to which is supposed to be "that's what we want them to do". (They also say "consumption taxes are regressive" even though that's easy to fix by giving everyone a large fixed refundable tax credit.)

So to placate them we use something claimed to be an income tax and then push on it until it acts like a consumption tax. Dividends are taxable, but here's a 401k that makes them not while you're of working age and so you only have to pay the tax when you retire and start spending it. Capital gains are taxable, but only when you realize them, so they get deferred as long as you keep them invested in the same company but if you withdraw the money to spend it, that's when you pay. And so on.

This is, of course, dumb, because it makes everything unnecessarily complicated and creates lots of opportunities for tax avoidance, and because it makes the problem you're going to complain about next worse: If they keep reinvesting the money then there is too much economic power in the hands of too few people. But look at what you've wrought. Now if someone invests in a company they get to defer the taxes until they want to spend the money or -- and this is the big problem -- they want to invest it in something else. You have to pay the tax now if you want to do that.

Which means that everybody wants their money to be in some ever-expanding megacorp that allows them to defer the tax until they actually want to spend it, instead of taking the profits from one company and using it to invest in a new one. Which is the thing that wouldn't have been penalized if you were actually using a consumption tax.

And the corporations are actually the problem, not the owners. However much power is concentrated into Microsoft or Apple or Google, that's how much power the CEO of that company will have, regardless of what percentage of the company's stock they own. So you can't fix it by taxing the owners, you have to fix it by making the companies smaller, and that's the thing the existing system makes worse.

This makes the most sense. The trick is to tax all realized value.

I’m happy for billionaires have their net worth go up, as long as it can be taxed if any amount they realize.

So this includes using their networth as collateral, donations (even to charities) and passing as inheritance (which should be taxed upon death)

And if the margin all tax rate over a 1 million is extremely high, then it’s pointless being a paper billionaire. People would actually spend their wealth and contribute to the economy

> Homeowners get taxed every year on the value of their property

By the local municipality, not the federal or state government.

Is that a big distinction? Is there anything limiting the states from preempting municipalities and levying at the state level?

Huh, I could have sworn the goalposts were over here in the "tax it" debate, not the "ensure it is taxed by a specific entity" debate.

There’s a certain amount of independence between municipalities, counties, states, and the federal government.

Except in a minority of cases (e.g. NYC), it is states and the federal government that taxes income and capital gains, and they are already not taxing citizens on the y realized value of their home.

So if one is upset about that, you have to take it up with local elections or introduce a measure with your state to prevent municipalities from levying this specific tax.

Yes the idea of property taxes is NOT to tax based on increase in wealth, just the current amount of wealth. And it serves a good purpose in municipalities who have to make sure infrastructure such as roads power and sewage systems are paid somehow. More expensive houses typically require more of those.

I don't know what point you're trying to make. Are you saying that wealth should be taxed but only at the county/municipal level? Or are you saying wealth can't be taxed because of federalism?

That's a different tax. Which speaks to my original point that the term "capital gains tax" is a thing, and seems to be misunderstood.

Tax on property is a completely different tax which works in a different way, and has a different name. A new tax on possession of robots could completely be a thing, but it just wouldn't be called a "capitol gains" tax.

> Homeowners get taxed every year on the value of their property. Let's do that to stocks, too.

Property tax is fairly regressive because everyone needs somewhere to live, property tax gets passed on as higher rents and living space generally scales sub-linearly with income. It's probably not something we should be emulating, especially if you're going to try to apply the same rules to small business owners.

Yes, I pay property taxes every year that are based on the current assessed values of my home and car. Only special classes of assets are subject to property taxes. "Wealth tax" proposals are a generalization of the idea of real property taxes so as to stop penalizing specific asset classes like homes.

If you dig into how property tax is allocated, your tax will only go up if your house appreciates more than similar properties - which usually has something like redevelopment or other externality.

It is normally not a fixed percentage of your value, but simply "here's what the county/city paid this/next year, divided amongst the properties proportionate to the value."

Some, like sewer, etc, are per-property, but most are done via the above.

California is an outlier because of Prop-13 but that makes it usually better except when buying.

Side-effects of this can mean that development in your district can reduce your tax rate, depending on what kind of development and who lives there (as property tax is often mainly a school tax, a development for 55+ will bring in more tax payers but not increase the school burden noticeably).

Right. Property taxes are a combination of fee-for-service for infrastructure, and a "congestion tax" for occupying land that nobody else can use. It's explicitly not a wealth tax because you owe it even if you have 0% equity.

You owe tax based on your percentage of ownership. The taxing authority doesn't care about equity because you own 100% of your house (albeit with a lien) even if your outstanding mortgage obligations exceed the value of the house. Generally, when you close on a house in the US, you walk away with the title to the house and a mortgage equal to a large percentage of the house's value. The bank only owes property taxes if they foreclose on the property and take the title from you.

I'm sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but all the property taxes I have ever paid (which, to be fair, has been in one county) have been a fixed percentage of the value of the property.

Those percentages tend to change over time though, right? What inputs do you think they have to their ideas on how to adjust it?

I don't think the percentage has changed since I moved here, though the dollar amount I pay has gone up significantly as the assessed value of my house has risen.

Like with any tax, I'm guessing the rate would change if the county's revenues didn't match their expenses?

In my county, tax rates have to be renewed every year. So every year there's a chance for the rates to change. There is an automatic suggestion of a "no new revenue" option formulated by the appraisal district based on their new assessments, there are then voter approved changes, and then the county (or taxing entity) decides.

My property taxes have practically only gone up over the years, but the tax rates from the various entities have mostly trended downwards.

My property taxes have doubled in the last 10 years.

You live in a house. Secondary residences however are not tax deductible?

yes, we do. it's called a property tax, and it goes up based on market value regardless of whether you sold the property or not.

it is absolutely a tax on unrealized gains

and it's a huge problem to where people who bought the house long ago (or it was passed down to them) but whose income hasn't kept pace (like many people's) can't afford the increased property taxes anymore and have to move

Sure, but recalculated every few years, not every day or even every year?

Yes? Their property tax goes up.

By that logic, you should also consider what happens if the brokerage account goes negative. Are you willing to do that?

That's an easy decision to make since almost no one's brokerage account has gone negative in almost forever. (Mine sure hasn't and I know nothing about stock investing except to buy index funds.)

The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other forums, that we know for a fact has been used in these frontier models. Great... where's my royalty check?

Pay us, not the government. We'll have to pay taxes regardless, and yes, close the tax loopholes on security-based capital gains (don't tax me for all the investment in my primary residence, that's a double dip).

I heard this called "Coasian" economics (as in Coase). I'm not sure what that actually means, though.

> where's my royalty check?

I support the idea of UBI with zero conditions, but not this. You didn't get royalties before AI when someone was heavily influenced by your work/content and converted that into money. If you expected compensation, then you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

The work was given to other humans. They paid taxes.

> The work was given to other humans. They paid taxes.

Says who? I mean what if black artists said they gave blues to black people, and white people making rock'n'roll? Black people spent money in black communities, now it's white people making it and spending it in theirs.

In essence they are the same point about outflows of value from the originating community. How you define a community, and what is integral is subjective.

I'm not convinced either way, but this line of reasoning feels dangerous.

I'd rather say that all ownership is communal, and as a community we allow people to retain some value to enable and encourage them further.

Still humans giving to humans. "White rock n roll artists" in your example paid taxes and those taxes benefited everyone.

That is your distinction because you chose to draw the line around all humans. But who is to say that the line shouldn't be drawn around black-people, or just men, or just Christians?

And no, taxes don't just magically benefit everyone. It's actually the point of them, that they are redistributive.

Who is to say the line should be drawn using discrimination?

Taxes fund the state. The state provides a minimum set of services - law and order, border security, fire safety - to everyone regardless of ability to pay. That others may derive additional state benefits is beside the point. Everyone gets something.

originally we all posted online to help each other, with problems we mutually have. it was community, and we always gave since we got back in a free exchange.

now, there is an oligarchy coming to compile all of that community to then serve it at a paid cost. what used to be free with some search, now is not and the government of the people is allowing no choice by the people (in any capacity).

once capital comes for things at scale (with the full backing of the government), and they monetize that and treat it as "their own" i would consider that plagiarism.

how can we be expected to pay taxes on every microtransaction, when we get nothing for equally traceable contributions to the new machine?

> you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

Almost none of the original work I've ever posted online has been "given away for free", because it was protected by copyright law that AI companies are brazenly ignoring, except where they make huge deals with megacorporations (eg openai and disney) because they do in fact know what they're doing is not fair use. That's true whether or not I posted it in a context where I expected compensation.

> Almost none of the original work I've ever posted online has been "given away for free", because it was protected by copyright law that AI companies are brazenly ignoring.

I just don't think the AI is doing anything differently than a human does. It "learns" and then "generates". As long as the "generates" part is actually connecting dots on its own and not just copy & pasting protected material then I don't see why we should consider it any different from when a human does it.

And really, almost nothing is original anyway. You think you wrote an original song? You didn't. You just added a thin layer over top of years of other people's layers. Music has converged over time to all sound very similar (same instruments, same rhythms, same notes, same scales, same chords, same progressions, same vocal techniques, and so on). If you had never heard music before and tried to write a truly original song, you can bet that it would not sound anything like any of the music we listen to today.

Coding, art, writing...really any creative endeavor, for the most part works the same way.

Conjecture on the functional similarities between LLMs and humans isn't relevant here, nor are sophomoric musings on the nature of originality in creative endeavors. LLMs are software products whose creation involves the unauthorized reproduction, storage, and transformation of countless copyright-protected works—all problematic, even if we ignore the potential for infringing outputs—and it is simple to argue that, as a commercial application whose creators openly tout their potential to displace human creators, LLMs fail all four fair use "tests".

It's not just "heavily influenced" though, it's literally where the smarts are coming from.

I don't think royalties make sense either, but we could at least mandate some arrangement where the resulting model must be open. Or you can keep it closed for a while, but there's a tax on that.

This nails my primary frustration with all gen AI - why are we all seemingly okay with a few massive companies and their billionaire CEOs training models on the output of all human civilization and then selling it back to us with the promise of putting all workers out of a job? How’s that not theft?

Well, you as a human train and live as a human on the output of all human civilization and if you are very efficient put people out of work. 99% of human jobs were physical labor and now machines do the work of thousands with one human superviser (oil tanker, machine loom, dump truck, train, etc). If humans are put completely out of the loop, that is a new problem for humans (super intelligent AI that takes over will likely be very bad for us) but avoiding that problem is another ball of wax.

Ronald Coase. https://economics.com.au/2013/09/03/coasian-thinking/ ; more broadly he has some great writing on the "theory of the firm".

Mmm, Coase is my jam.

"How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar?"

Alaska as a state managed to do just that and more or less has an annual UBI.

> The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

Payment for content access is a sure way to limit progress and freedom. Should I pay you based on quantity, quality, or usage that relates to your content? How about the ideas you took from other people, should you pay them? Where does it stop?

I think the copyright system as it exists today is just absurd - a complete inversion of what it was supposed to do. It was meant to promote progress by protecting expression. Now look at what's happened: total concept and feel protects aesthetic gestalt, Structure and Srrangement protects how elements relate, Whelan Test protects the entire logical skeleton while AFC (abstraction filtration comparison) enables hierarchical abstraction protection.

Each rung up the ladder takes us further from "I wrote this specific thing" toward "nobody else can solve this problem in similar ways". This is how platforms get rich while common people, readers and creators, lose their freedoms and are exploited.

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