Is taxing robots (or more specifically people using robots in place of employees) "idiocy," as Mish suggests, or logical, as Bill Gates suggests? What do you think?
***
Courtesy of Mish
I am unsure who first came up with the idea of taxing robots, but the proposal has been embraced by academia, socialists, and in general, the radical Left.
Today, entrepreneur Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, endorsed the idea.
What does Gates want to do with the money collected? Here’s the answer: Flush it down the toilet.
In a Quartz interview, Bill Gates proposes The robot that takes your job should pay taxes.
Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment. It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology.
In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.
“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues.
Quartz: What do you think of a robot tax? This is the idea that in order to generate funds for training of workers, in areas such as manufacturing, who are displaced by automation, one concrete thing that governments could do is tax the installation of a robot in a factory, for example.
Bill Gates: Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.
Fortune on Robot Tax
Fortune discusses the proposal in Bill Gates Says Robots Should Be Taxed Like Workers.
