NYC Mayor and Presidential Hopeful Bill De Blasio Wants a Tax On Robots (cnet.com) 88
In an opinion article published last week on Wired, New York City Mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio said as president he would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans and would create a federal agency to oversee automation. CNET reports: "The scale of automation in our economy is increasing far faster than most people realize, and its impact on working people in America and across the world, unless corralled, will be devastating," de Blasio wrote. De Blasio would call the new regulator the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency, which would safeguard jobs and communities. In addition, his proposed "robot tax" would be imposed on large companies that eliminate jobs as they become more automated. The tax would be equal to five years of payroll taxes for each employee eliminated, according to De Blasio.
Robots move (Score:4, Informative)
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
- R. Reagan
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure Mr. De Blasio would like AI to become sophisticated enough were the robots would simply need to pay a wage tax, but not sophisticated enough to be eligible to vote. Welcome to AI's De Blasio Zone
NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION! (Score:2)
UNIONIZE!
your comrade in The Struggle, Screw Sorting Robot X-43
Reagan's trickle-down view is failing (Score:4, Insightful)
We may need a degree of "make work" socialism to avoid mass riots. There don't seem to be enough lower-end jobs to replace those lost to automation and overseas outsourcing. Think Occupy-Wall-Street on steroids.
During the boom years of the "business cycle" perhaps there are enough jobs for High School graduates, but during slumps the choices may be too slim. And trickle-down isn't working.
Re: (Score:2)
That would requiring auditing hiring practices of companies. Biz bribes GOP to skip that step. A wall alone won't change much. I'm just the messenger.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe a flood, like in the Bible.
-- Mickey - The Crow (1994)
Or a big ass war, another "War to end all Wars".
Keep people occupied and industriously shooting each other.
And at the end there will be a lot less people to find jobs for.
"make work" is stupid (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What?!? And give up the Protestant work ethic? Blasphemy!
Re: (Score:1)
Or, how about helping the sick, poor, elderly, disabled, etc. Think outside the hole.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course trickle down is working just as designed, piss on the poor as the rich want more (let's not even try to pretend that was not the intent).
The problem with taxing automation, litter is not just about rubbish, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], the poor as always carrying the rich, a car can be considered automation, as it replaced the efforts of four people.
The choice is focus on the equitable division of resources to promote a healthy happy society or continue to feed the greed, ego and lusts of p
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe if we dialed back this idea that corporations are people, and instead treated them with the necessary differences, we could enjoy both wide individual freedom as well as a prosperous nation.
The biggest fleece was that they convinced everyone that destroying your body with underpaid work was a path to some sort of better way, when most people end up spending their whole lives working and working and working, and finally there's no life left to live.
Don't fool yourself that the European way is the answe
Re: Reagan's trickle-down view is failing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
This rich dude is warning other billionaires of a similar risk. [politico.com]
This is silly (Score:2)
We may need a degree of "make work" socialism to avoid mass riots. There don't seem to be enough lower-end jobs to replace those lost to automation and overseas outsourcing. Think Occupy-Wall-Street on steroids.
During the boom years of the "business cycle" perhaps there are enough jobs for High School graduates, but during slumps the choices may be too slim. And trickle-down isn't working.
How about we, oh, I don't know, crack down on outsourcing? It's in our national interest to slap a tax or tariff on every outsourced piece of Chinese crap that Corporate America tries to sell us.
Allowing continued unfettered outsourcing while compensating with useless make-work jobs will just make things doubly worse: you're rewarding corporations for sending jobs to overseas sweat shops, then subsidizing make-workers to purchases that same Chinese crap with tax dollars.
For frack's sake, it's like treating
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't nearly enough though. There should be no wage savings from switching to robots, the tax should be the workers expected career salary+benefits accounting for projected cost of living and performance bonuses. Essentially every worker displaced funds the retirement of a worker. This is a big up front cost and will slow the introduction of a robotic workforce but it will do it in a sustainable way and there will still be gains. Displaced wages don't create value they merely shift it onto the taxpayer
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We've known since Reagan that trickle-down doesn't work but politicians are still giving tax breaks to the very rich. Stop trying to make it work because it won't. Something else needs to be tried.
Also, automation isn't going to wipe out jobs for just those with a high school education. Those with a university education are going to be impacted too. Lawyers, accountants, and any job that involves a lot of repetition or looking up information (a lot of junior lawyers do this part of the job) are going to be
Re: (Score:2)
He wants more taxes. Robots are in the news. Ergo...
It doesn't take an ASI to figure out a politician.
Re: (Score:2)
I Want a Tax On Politicians (Score:2)
"The scale of automation in our economy is increasing far faster than most people realize, and its impact on working people in America and across the world, unless corralled, will be devastating," de Blasio wrote."
I don't consider politicians as "working people"
Let's tax their asses off!
Or even better still . . . replace them with robots!
Bender has my vote!
Question for Mr. DeBlasio (Score:2)
Someone should ask Mr. DeBlasio this question:
Q: If there are too few jobs for the population, how does making corporations give more money to the government help?
In order to vote for someone, you should see a clear relationship between what they propose and how it will help you (or your family, your country, whatever).
This sounds suspiciously like a proposal with no clear benefit to the people. Government retraining for new jobs has never worked in the cases it was previously tried, (IIRC, one program cost
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
People forget that automation also makes goods and services cheaper. It's not uncommon to see bums with cell phones these days. I think a UB
Re: (Score:2)
Someone should ask Mr. DeBlasio this question:
Q: If there are too few jobs for the population, how does making corporations give more money to the government help?
I suspect what DeBlasio hopes will be the outcome is this:
If you tax robots, they become more expensive to run and so fewer jobs will be automated. One robot might replace 20 people, now those 20 people have their job back.
Personally I disagree with his thinking, I think we should be looking at ways to make the workforce do more interesting and creative jobs, and finding new jobs, rather than go backwards into a time when robots didn't make everything more efficient and cheaper.
Re: (Score:1)
Machines are doing more and more of the "real work" anyhow. And this includes non-AI machines in many cases. (A lot is also outsourced overseas.)
A growing number of US jobs are actually "bullshit management": how to trick or sue people out of money. People talk about the "gig economy", but it's actually the "bullshit economy".
Re: (Score:2)
Bender has my vote!
Bad choice. After all, Bender should be allowed on TV.
Looks like a great idea; impossible to audit (Score:2)
I like the idea of replacing the revenues for government and social welfare needs. But what exactly is a robot, and how many robots replace how many people for what amount of tasks? How does that evolve? Is an ordering kiosk, one human replacement or two?
When you go to the totally automated McDonalds or Rally's, just how many people does that count for, and for how long?
I like the idea of people working rather than "robots" but make-work jobs and strange occupations are tough to describe. I prefer people to
Re: (Score:3)
Those damned robotic elevators put elevator operators out of work!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Robots are just technology. Every 20 years or so the latest technologies makes people afraid that all their jobs are going to taken away. While all technology does is change their jobs so each person can output more, allowing for company growth and hiring more employees as each employee offers more value to the organization.
You can say a CNC machine can replace wood carvers. However for fine wood working you still need carvers. For the cheaper stuff we can now get intricate carving where we go without i
Re: (Score:2)
The scale is like never before, so the comparisons aren't easy to make the way you claim. Yes, a CNC and lathes and other tools exist and have for a long time. When do robots serve us drinks, service our vehicles, or AI-driven voices answer complex questions -- not like the interactive-voice-response systems of today, but something beyond that. Already we use phone automation, text automation, and more. Which are robots and how many meat humans do they replace, and at what tax rate?
Re:Looks like a great idea; impossible to audit (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, no.
We went from 80+% farmers to 5% farmers. I'm pretty sure that 75% of our workforce is not unemployed, so obviously we found something for 3/4 of the population to do that was reasonably productive. And I don't see any reason to believe that robots are going to put even half the country out of work, much less 3/4 of it....
Re: (Score:2)
Around 20.2 million are employed in wholesale and retail trade and it's the second largest employment sector. It covers a wide range of jobs so while not everything in the sector is susceptible to automation there are significant fractions in warehousing that would be susceptible to automation. Manufacturing is fourth at around 15.5 million. Construction is sixth at about 11.1 million. Transportation is eighth at 8.5 million. Those are the jobs that would be impacted by physical automation. Not all jobs wil
Re: (Score:2)
Percentages are great when you want to mask actual numbers and create false equivalency.
A 15% return on a billion dollars will allow for more than 100 new top 5% incomes on ridiculously low risk diversified passive investments each year while a 15% return on 100 won't grow to a meaningful number in 20 years. The 80% to 5% isn't anywhere near the number of workers are talking about here and it also represents a bad decision that leaves us at the mercy of other nations and compromises our decision making toda
Re: (Score:2)
Technology in the Farming Sector in many aspects has been superior to that of the Silicon Valley Technology. Self driving tractors have been around for decades, big data analysis too has been around for a long time. There have been robots aiding farming for a while.
We find jobs, that humans need to do. Robots normally take jobs we don't want to do anyways.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing that needs to be changed, is that with technology, we need to change our jobs to be around being kind to people.
We don't go to a bar just to get a drink. You can go to a Liquor store and get the drink for less. You go to the bar for the people, service and interaction. Even the most introverted of us, do like the friendly hello, and some passing interest in what we want. Even if it is just ordering a fast food meal. As for robots fixing our cars. There is a good degree of human intuition involv
Re: (Score:2)
I like the idea of replacing the revenues for government and social welfare needs. But what exactly is a robot, and how many robots replace how many people for what amount of tasks? How does that evolve? Is an ordering kiosk, one human replacement or two?
When you go to the totally automated McDonalds or Rally's, just how many people does that count for, and for how long?
I like the idea of people working rather than "robots" but make-work jobs and strange occupations are tough to describe. I prefer people to deal with as waiters and most other jobs. The "user experience" of most human interface replacements leave a lot to be desired.... although I've had my share of weird waiters/waitresses/in-betweens.
This is wickedly tough to classify.
Another thought: Who gets most of the tax money collected? The unemployed, a "general fund" - or will it go to sticky fingers (politicians for a new yacht, lawyers). In principle it sounds like a good idea; in practice experience has taught me to be wary.
Re: (Score:2)
Our current economy has almost zero unemployement. Seriously. Is the time to add taxes for dubious vote-gathering?
Re: (Score:2)
Your metaphors are hilarious. Robots and women don't have them. Shoot away.
Really, much of the economy is vastly UNDERemployed. Burger flipping jobs and lots of low-skill jobs including farming are getting replaced. Who pays for all of those humans? What do they do for a living?
Re: (Score:2)
On top of that, why is hardware replacing jobs different from software replacing jobs?
Re: (Score:3)
I disagree with this idea entirely. It is horribly misguided at best and dangerously reckless at worst. I've written about this at length in other posts. Automation is merely the latest technology boogeyman. Throughout human history we have continuously invented machines that make work easier and that would 'displace workers.' I'm sure the people that hand drafted books got concerned when the printing press became a thing. The loom certainly must have worried old school tailors and such too.
A decent a
Re: Looks like a great idea; impossible to audit (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Competitive edge mostly. I've worked in the automation sector for quite a while and like I already said, lower level jobs do disappear, but newer high level jobs take their place. It would be absolutely idiotic for a company to automate something and then say, "Well, lets just sit back and collect our money now." Because their competition will then quickly turn around, do the same automation, then take the next step of reinvesting the cost savings into improvements in the product line, data analysis, or a
Re: (Score:2)
like I already said, lower level jobs do disappear, but newer high level jobs take their place
10 lower level jobs disappear, and only 1 high level job take their place. And none of the 10 original people is qualified to do the new job.
Re: Looks like a great idea; impossible to audit (Score:2)
Not really. There are a number of jobs that spring up around it and more work is getting done overall (efficiency is a funny thing like that). Now I don't disagree that retraining is necessary for the displaced workers, but that hardly a reason to run shrieking into the night about automation being the devil.
Re: (Score:2)
Retraining is not a realistic proposition. Most of the time, people just find another unskilled job, or remain unemployed. The new jobs that appear are taken by new young workers.
Re: (Score:2)
I would still argue that isn't a reason to try and halt the gears of progress. People have to take an interest in bettering themselves and their own future, and if they refuse to do so out of simple stubbornness to adapt then we can't bend to their will at everyone else's detriment. If these people are not retraining because of cost or other external factors however, we need to work on removing those barriers. The reality of a free market that so many claim to enjoy is that you have to go where the work
Re: (Score:2)
You're forgetting that there's no need to provide insurance, pay into Social Security, Medicare, Worker's Comp,, offer vacation and sick days to robots.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Looks like a great idea; impossible to audit (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree with your reasons, but I agree with your conclusions. The final end point of automation is mass unemployment. A time will come when machines do just about everything better than humans. We aren't there yet. We probably have a long way to go. But it also might come a lot sooner than you think. Either way, it'll happen eventually. Once we get there, it doesn't matter how many new "jobs" get created, because machines will do those jobs better than humans too. Eventually human labor will be u
Stupidity, rank stupidity. (Score:2)
These morons are the people trying to drive our policies.
It's the same game these idiots play with "corporate taxation". They set laws that implement taxes, corporations legally avoid it, and they try to nail in more and more regulations instead of just saying "gee, what if we just get rid of that bullshit and tax the people who _profit_ from the corporations more?".
Instead of (fucking lol) "robot taxes" just increase income taxes a bit on the top 10% of income earners including capital gains and income, et
Does a robot have to be a physical entity? (Score:2)
What of an online card catalog, replacing the librarian?
The list is just beginning...
Re: (Score:2)
Can a voice-recognition system that gets rid of human operators, human salespeople, human technical support, a robot?
The list is just beginning...
No kidding. I can't even begin to list all the jobs we've automated away over the last century or so. ATMs, web sites, airplane autopilots, streaming media, Roombas, pre-fab building frame trusses, CNCs, DoorDash, FasTrack transponders, tractors and combines, the list is endless. Each of them destroys some jobs and creates new ones,
I work in a DevOps team. Our entire job is to automate away software development tasks so the dev team can work faster. Does a Jenkins job count as a robot? Or does it only count
Re: Does a robot have to be a physical entity? (Score:1)
So the workaround is to start a new company (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
First hing that jumped out from the page. So completely obvious that the politicians seem to have missed it entirely.
Don't forget capital depreciation (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The hilarious thing is that as stupid as this is, it doesn't even matter. This will just drive companies to innovate even more efficient, cheaper robots so they won't pay as many taxes on them.
Instead of a $5m machine that replaces 10 people, some company will come up with a $4m machine that replaces 10 people and do better in the market.
Again, it's all so silly. Just raise the taxes on the top 10% more if you want more money out of them, enough of this trying to cheat capitalism and evolution.
Re: (Score:2)
Robots on bicycles are really screwed (Score:2)
Good way to drive manufacturing out of the country (Score:2)
I for one welcome our robot underlords (Score:4, Interesting)
It already is. The "best" places for manufacturing allow mass polluting and horrid working conditions. Also known as "commie slaves". Arguably we shouldn't permit trade with countries that allow such.
Perhaps we can milk our robot "slaves" if we can rid the idea of "job or death". We have wonderful machines to do most of the grunt work of society, why not leverage that and free up human time!
The ancient Greeks advanced art, science, philosophy, and math because they had war captives as slaves, freeing many to ponder the Universe. We potentially are in a similar position except the "slaves" are robots.
Lets ponder ways to rework the economy so humans have more spare time and bots do most the grunt work. If somebody proves that's not mathematically possible, I'd like to see the proof. Otherwise, it's worth exploring. Trying to resurrect the past may be a dead end. The factories ain't coming back and bots will soon be flipping burgers and driving trucks.
Bank will love this (Score:2)
http://www.aei.org/publication... [aei.org]
Since ATMs resulted in more human teller jobs (albeit doing few tedious tasks like counting out twenties), banks will need to get a lucrative credit under this new robot taxation scheme.
How about something real for a change? (Score:1)
DeBlasio is terrible, and if not such a narcissistic jerk would have had the good sense to drop out of the election for the good of the party, the country, etc. Robot bit is an obvious headline ploy for a flat lined campaign. He doesn't have the same credibility as say Andrew Yang and DeBlasio's weirdness isn't endearing like Marianne Williamson.
Aside from that, It'd be nice if a candidate would address some of the real, near-term issues around work and employment. Such as:
- Separating health care from e
Measuring headaches (Score:1)
I'll put the social value of the idea to the side for a moment. From an accounting standpoint, this seems really hard to quantify. What exactly is a single "bot"? How many cores, how many microservices, how many servers, etc? If dedicated or custom neural net chips are used, then rules based on commodity equipment won't apply.
Further, I'm sure many have seen the heated debates about what exactly qualifies as "AI". To me, it looks like a continuum, not a Boolean attribute.
AI Machine Learning?!? (Score:1)
Robot? (Score:2)
So, what exactly is their definition of a robot?
Obligatory... (Score:1)
Taxation is theft.
Re: (Score:3)
Taxation is as old as civilization. Number and writing systems were invented in part to improve taxing.
You are about 7,000 years too late to complain about taxes. Your kind were either fed to the wolves or went back to caves. (Wolves find libertarians delicious.)
Society has certain benefits and tradeoffs. Taxing is one of the tradeoffs. You can still go live "off the grid" in hills, islands, or caves if you don't like these tradeoffs. Make your own "Internet" out of smoke signals. #Enjoy!
Leadership. (Score:1)
So a mayor of a city where basically nothing is manufactured wants to tax manufacturing productivity. And he is trying to make the case that he knows how to grow an economy?
Best to just pack it in now, Mr. Mayor. We have had enough clueless New York Billionaire in the Oval office for a while - we may need to take a 50 year break like after Rockefeller was VP.
Wrong End of the Problem (Score:2)
If the demand for human labor does begin to shrink because of automation, the cost of living should decrease in kind, such that the average human can get by on less work. That could mean fewer hours per week, or an earlier retirement age.
A tax on efficiency isn't the right approach for this. The intervention that will likely be necessary is more of what we already have: regulation to ensure competition and prevent cartel-like behavior or other price gouging.
Obviously it's not nearly as simple as I'm making
Scare Tactic (Score:1)
World's oldest profession (Score:2)
Bill de Blasio said as president he would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans and would create a federal agency to oversee automation
Of course he would. Politicians: Glomming onto the efforts of others since the very first farming trade posts that became proto-cities.
This is a rare case where both taxation and getting in the way (regulation) popped out of a politician's mouth at the same moment.
Re: (Score:1)
City got a tax on innovation? (Score:1)
US getting a federal robot tax?
Thats not a robot, that's a production line with humans. See they are using computers.
There is a tax on robots and other automation (Score:1)
Its called the corporate tax. See, you replace an "expensive" human with a "cheap" robot. Costs of labor goes down per unit of production. Now the company is making more money, hence more profits to tax.
If you want to actually tax robots as a separate line item, you will have to get into the game of defining a robot, having companies work around the definition so that they aren't robots and generally being less efficient to avoid the taxes. This isn't a good thing in general