
Taxing robots: SF supervisor wants California to talk about it - MilnerRoute
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/08/25/taxing-robots-sf-supervisor-wants-california-talk/
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thomas_howland
Taxing "robots" is silly, mostly because it's impossible to define what a
"robot" is in a remotely non-distortionary way or that doesn't require a horde
of accountants to argue out.

Taxing "capital", by its monetary value, is much easier, and has a similar
effect of promoting labor substitution. It's also universally despised by
economists for the obvious reason that accumulating capital increases the
return to labor under most models and makes everyone wealthier.

Of course California state politics are notoriously dumb, so who knows what'll
happen.

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URSpider94
Piketty and his collaborators being a notable and significant exception.
[https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-
saezNBER12optKtax.pdf](https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-
saezNBER12optKtax.pdf)

Taxing capital is hard, because it's mobile. Governments are afraid that if
they tax wealth at a high rate, the wealth will just move elsewhere. Thus,
most businesses get some sort of property tax abatement as part of an
incentive to locate in a particular city or state.

~~~
benlorenzetti
But taxing capital would still be easier than taxing robot work, yes? Since
taxing robots is effectively a tax on a difficult to define subset of capital

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URSpider94
Not arguing with you there -- taxing robot work sounds almost nonsensical. If
anything it would be a great jobs program for tax lawyers who will tie
themselves in knots figuring out how to circumvent this ill-defined tax.

Taxing capital is very straightforward from a regulations standpoint. It's
only hard in that the capital will tend to flee the tax.

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payne92
tl;dr: A SF supervisor 'launched the "Jobs of the Future Fund", a crowdfunding
effort to raise money to nudge the state to study the issue of what will
happen to human workers in the age of automation.'

Related article: [http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/05/04/tax-robots-sf-
supervis...](http://www.siliconbeat.com/2017/05/04/tax-robots-sf-supervisor-
exploring-idea/)

The fundamental problem: what's a "robot"?

We've been developing labor-saving devices and technologies since the dawn of
civilization. Where's the line where a device becomes taxable?

Roomba? Teslas? A tractor? Looms? Machine tools? Drones? Printing presses?
Teleprompters? Automated tomato sorting machines?

I'm all for figuring out the future where there are many unemployed workers
because there are no longer enough labor jobs. But if we're taxing labor
replacement, we might as well just raise the sales tax.

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slindz
I'm not sure I understand your sales tax suggestion.

Wouldn't a sales tax increase punish the consumers losing their jobs?

Doesn't the increase in taxation have to come from business revenues in some
way as a means to offset the reduction in consumer job income?

update: I may be looking at the problem as too much as a closed system (ie.
things are made where they're sold). The implications of relocating production
to areas with different taxation rules make an ideal solution very tricky.

