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Robotics Businesses Democrats Government The Almighty Buck Technology

NYC Mayor and Presidential Hopeful Bill De Blasio Wants a Tax On Robots (cnet.com) 88

Posted by BeauHD from the protection-from-automation dept.
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.
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NYC Mayor and Presidential Hopeful Bill De Blasio Wants a Tax On Robots More

NYC Mayor and Presidential Hopeful Bill De Blasio Wants a Tax On Robots

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  • Robots move (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Monday September 09, 2019 @07:33PM (#59175804)

    "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

    • Reagan's trickle-down view is failing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday September 09, 2019 @08:30PM (#59175932) Journal

      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.

      • What this place needs is a good catastrophe. Earthquake, tornado...
        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.
      • At that point you may as well recognize that digging ditch to jsut fill them in is STUPID. People are not overall that completely terminally retarded that they don't understand that "busy work" is useless. That would not only damage their mental health (doing busy work and knowing it indeed damage mental health) but also add friction and useless administration in the system. At that point you are better off recognizing an UBI is far simpler.

        • What?!? And give up the Protestant work ethic? Blasphemy!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          At that point you may as well recognize that digging ditch to just fill them in is STUPID

          Or, how about helping the sick, poor, elderly, disabled, etc. Think outside the hole.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        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)

          by LocalH ( 28506 )

          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

      • I hope the authorities realize that we would not survive the social fallout of another downturn. Things are humming along and people are still losing thier shit and offing themselves and staging walkouts on thier employers.

      • 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)

          by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          If a corporation can't outsource to get what they want for cheap, they'll do in the the US...with bots. Both are an issue.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        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

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • The number of open jobs has been record breaking of late. If your point is that it won't be so rosy during an economic bust... yeah, that's the cycle. Been that way since always.

      • 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

    • He wants more taxes. Robots are in the news. Ergo...

      It doesn't take an ASI to figure out a politician.

    • Ah Ronnie, "We begin bombing in five minutes."

  • "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!

    • 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)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 )
        A better question would be why the hell he wants to abolish ICE and keep sanctuary cities around. If you foresee a shortage of jobs in the future, it makes no sense to allow or even support the importation of low-skill labor. If that's a policy you want fine, but at least be logically consistent with your other policies if you even want me to consider voting for you.

        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

      • 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)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      I don't consider politicians as "working people"

      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".

    • Bender has my vote!

      Bad choice. After all, Bender should be allowed on TV.

  • 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

    • 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

      • 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)

          by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Monday September 09, 2019 @09:29PM (#59176050)

          The scale is like never before

          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....

          • 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)

            by Shaitan ( 22585 )

            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

          • 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.

        • 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

    • 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)

        by Puls4r ( 724907 )
        No - it doesn't sound like a good idea. Our products are already expensive on the global market. And we're going to shoot ourselves in the dick, tax the companies, and make them even more expensive?

        Our current economy has almost zero unemployement. Seriously. Is the time to add taxes for dubious vote-gathering?

        • 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)

      by Livius ( 318358 )

      On top of that, why is hardware replacing jobs different from software replacing jobs?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zmobie ( 2478450 )

      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

      • Why would a company invest in Automation if they were not expecting to be able to get rid of some people? The other thing..plcs can replace a printing press, a loom and a nuclear power plant worker. That is the difference.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Zmobie ( 2478450 )

          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

          • 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.

            • 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.

              • 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)

                  by Zmobie ( 2478450 )

                  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)

        by Pyramid ( 57001 )

        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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • You are referencing trades like book drafting and tailoring that stood to benefit from the automation examples you cited. Replacing millions of drones with superior kiosks is not going to benefit those drones directly. It is going to leave them to focus on, often misguided, social issues and political action. Riots.

      • 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

  • 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

  • Can a voice-recognition system that gets rid of human operators, human salespeople, human technical support, a robot?

    What of an online card catalog, replacing the librarian?

    The list is just beginning...

    • 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

  • The tax seems to be only on companies that replace existing employees with robots. It seems like someone could easily get around that by just creating a new company that uses automation, and slowly lay off workers from the older company.
    • That or do what most companies do now, Ship jobs to another country to avoid the tax.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by martinX ( 672498 )

      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)

    by g01d4 ( 888748 ) on Monday September 09, 2019 @07:49PM (#59175840)
    From an MIT Tech Review link [technologyreview.com]:

    ...by not taxing the machines as we currently tax human labor, we're actually subsidizing robots heavily. We even provide tax incentives for more robots in the form of capital depreciation. So the argument isn't to tax robots directly - it's to more fairly tax capital equipment, which includes robots.

    • 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.

    • That's more of a classification issue. In my state for example, ALL assets owned by a company in that state get taxed every year -- even leasehold improvements (money paid to improve a building the company doesn't even own) and software development. The real question is, how long does it take to depreciate those assets -- short term, like a computer (typically three years), or longer term, like a desk or office chair (typically ten years)? Currently that depends on how those assets are classified on the
  • Hope they don't want to carry a gun.
  • This will just make America a very unattractive country to set up manufacturing jobs. American factories will shut down and open in more robot friendly countries. And if America tries to punish them with tariffs, the other countries will retaliate and the American economy will enter a death spiral.

    • I for one welcome our robot underlords (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday September 09, 2019 @08:47PM (#59175970) Journal

      This will just make America a very unattractive country to set up manufacturing jobs.

      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.

  • ...the impact of the ATM machine was not to destroy tellers, actually it was to increase it.

    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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • How would these be handled?

  • So, what exactly is their definition of a robot?

  • Taxation is theft.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Taxation is theft.

      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!

  • 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.

  • 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

  • He obviously wants to frighten under educated people who fear change. All of the negatives that he mentions assume that we will still keep the social and economic systems now in place. We need to use maximum support of new technologies and also arrange support of those that are no longer employed. Right now, you make money for you. The new system will change that and a machine will make money for you or numerous machines will make money for you.

  • 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.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Move your robot skills to a better US city.
    US getting a federal robot tax?
    Thats not a robot, that's a production line with humans. See they are using computers.

  • 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

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