alt Hacker NewsWell for starters, robots shouldn’t be tax deductible because you get a net deduction already from not paying wages, so you should pay maximum tax on their purchase price.
(Otherwise you would buy a robot.. tax deduct it, then pay less tax by not paying wages, which basically means humans would be paying tax to offset the cost of corporates buying robot to replace their own jobs which doesn’t seem fair)
Plus, they should probably add a 50% VAT or something like that on initial purchase, which covers displaced tax for at least 1-2 years and can help cover any initial teething issues or increases in social services.
I personally don’t think I can deal with living in a society where robots are so cheap that within 5 years or whatever there’s 2-3 times the human population worth of robots. Tax it all to hell, because that sounds maddening.
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Yep, if robots really become that cheap and widespread, it could dramatically shift the balance of power in society
You know in an ideal world, maybe these robots don’t last that long, but they still end up slightly cheaper than workforce, so we just tax the hell out of them and give all the money back to the people as UBI and that’s how we achieve the UBI utopia.
Or maybe we treat them like motor cars and make people register them on an annual basis if they’re going to use them commercially… like $30k/year or something.