alt Hacker NewsNo, not the AI. Just the owner of means of production like AI.
The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
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Can we have a grown up discussion that uses numbers instead of hyperbole?
Certainly you can argue income inequality is too high and capital holders and high earners need to pay much more.
But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems". They pay a lot in capital gains and income taxes, even if they don't contribute as much as they should.
This is a bad deal. Capital makes the marginal worker more productive, not less. You can tax the worker and she will still be better off than if you had taxed the capital, due to greater productivity. (This argument also applies to AI, of course. Since AI doesn't just instantly wipe out all jobs, there will be many workers that will benefit from it and will thus be quite able to fund their governments and social systems.) If you wish to tax some forms of "capital", or rather assets, you should focus on pure rent-generating assets like valuable urban land, or local exclusivity rights to parts of the EM spectrum.
> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is
Are you sure capital owners do not contribute to our states and financial systems?
For instance, Jeff Bezos is worth $238 billion even though Amazon has a $2.6 trillion market cap. That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.
Jensen Huang is worth $164 billion while NVIDIA’s market cap is $5 trillion. That’s $4.8 trillion of value for other people (ignoring value created for non-equity stakeholders).
etc.
I'm not saying that there should not ALSO be other ways to force contribution (e.g. via taxes), but to say they do not contribute at all is false.
It’s much easier to tax the general population than businesses, as they don’t push back as much.
It’s the same pattern everywhere around the world (perhaps there are a few exceptions). Businesses can be much more creative with tax evasion as well.
The fundamental problem of our time is that even capital in the form of bricks makes more money than most kinds of labor.
The top 1% of earners in the US pay 40% of all income taxes.
I could not agree more.
Another fundamental problem is that the means of production are concentrated into the hands of a few.
Interesting discussion concerning this on Prof G at around 35 minutes.
> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems
The top 1% pay 40% of the Federal income tax.
The fact that people think, capital owners who actually provide employment and produce useful things and do better the better they serve the consumer even when their motives aren’t altruistic (and when they are altruistic it is even better) should be taxed more so the giant government corporation can make bureaucrats pockets fatter and waste a bunch of money doing inefficient things is more of a fundamental problem.
I argue there is a more fundamental problem with the money: Debasement.
Debasement is an invisible tax and its effects far outweigh individuals bypassing taxes.
> capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social system
> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
Are you talking about taxing unrealized capital gains?
Because for the situation where capital is directly replacing labor, the income generation is taxed regardless of the whether it’s generated by a human or machine.
If I hire people to make and sell hot dogs, they pay taxes on their wages. If I build an automated hot dog vending machine, I still pay taxes on the profits of selling those same hot dogs.
One can’t spend any of the money until it becomes personal assets. So what is not being taxed?
If I keep them in the company, I pay corporate tax on profits (22%) for retained earnings. And then I’d have to pay dividend tax (either 15% or 20%) atop those retained earnings to pay them out to myself as income. Or I pay myself a salary and pay regular income tax on the full amount.
Due to our progressive tax brackets and double taxation of dividends, both options end up with larger tax rates than when dealing purely with low wage human labor. We as a society collect more in taxes from one high income earner than multiple low income ones.
We should do what the moslems do. 2.5% wealth tax on everybody above a minimal wealth threshold!
Is there any time in human history where this wasn't the case? Genuinely curious.
In essence...
Tax not paid by ultra wealthy goes back into he system as loans that extract interest that in turn is used to buy assets sold to pay for interest, those are then rented back to the system to extract more interest.
In essence by allowing no tax to be paid by the ultra wealthy, we facilitate the death of the middle class and transfer of everything to the very few - with mathematical precision.
Ultimately we need to ask ourselves why we have a society, what's it's purpose.
For the few or the many ?
What's crazy is that productivity per employee just keeps increasing year after year, but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes. They should be doing the exact opposite! Taxes should be raised as productivity increases! AI is just one more tool that gradually increases productivity, among others.
If AI really is just another capital amplifier, then the problem isn't new, AI just makes the existing imbalance harder to ignore
Most of the capital is owned (through pension funds and then different investment funds) by completely ordinary people who put their completely ordinary savings into it and get completely ordinary pensions out of it.
So you are effectively suggesting to forcibly take their money from them and then give it back, but through a corrupt and bureaucratic system of the state.
of all* time.
there is hope for HN!!!
> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is, in my view, one of the fundamental problems of our time.
So the government is going to fix this, right? Right...?
And it makes the governments that have been allowing this more a part of organized crime than of anything else. It's unmitigated corruption.
I'm all for raising taxes is on the rich but the government is extremely fiscally irresponsible.
The current interest on our national debt is greater than our military spending.
So if you increase taxes some people think it would just be throwing it into the money fire of Washington.
There needs to be a lot of changes in D.C.: term limits in congress, citizens united needs to be repealed, erc etc
It's hard to truly comprehend the damage Red Scare did to all of our collective lives. The Post-WW2 era utterly destroyed the labor movement and pretty much any form of collective action. And all but about 10,000 people are worse off for it.
So many commnents here, yours included, make perfect sense when you simply look at them through the lens of the workers' relationship to the means of production.
Automation could be a good thing. It could mean we need to do less work and have more leisure time. Instead it gets concentrated in the hands of very few so they can become even wealthier. And the resultant layoffs are used to extract free labor from the people who remain and suppress their wages, all to eke out more profits.
I find it ironic that individual income tax is a thing in USA, but as soon as AI does the work, oh only the owner has to pay.
As a libertarian, I find the whole requirement for workers to secure an accountant and file individual income taxes under threat of retaliation silly. Individuals should be free to engage in activities like working for an employer, taking care of their kids or aging parents, or having sex, without paying tax to the government. Taxes should be levied on companies and robots, not humans doing everyday things.
The employer knows exactly how much they are paying each employee, and they already have accountants on staff. Why create "bullshit jobs" just for employees to file this same exact information again?
So yeah, we shouldn't wait for AI to replace workers, to abolish the individual income tax for individuals. It should have been done a long time ago. Employers can pay the tax (as they do with FICA). And in fact, we're going to have to have a tax regime that taxes robots, which would become the primary economic actors soon anyway. If corporations can have legal personhood, surely robots can too LMAO.
You can’t ask someone to pay taxes if they have a bigger, cheaper army.
The top 1% already pays more than 40% of all federal income tax at a 26.09% effective rate. The bottom 50% has an effective rate of 3.7% and contributes only 3% of all tax revenues.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?
In a capitalist system, capital makes the rules for everyone. This is why capital earns more than labour. System working as intended.
Rich people pay pretty much all taxes in the United States.
It's the right thing. Let's say one compaagny makes everything.
Then it should be asked to give a part of it for free. Not necessarily money by the way.
Very well put. I am working on tooling that will likely increase developer productivity by a large factor; and will most likely be used to lay off more developers as their labor is no longer required.
I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.
It’s the fact that all the gains are being collected by the already uber-wealthy that’s wrong.
Economists generally agree that taxing capital owners is bad policy and taxes should be directed at consumers: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-...
> Three: Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's good. Don't tax companies in an effort to tax rich people.
> Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you're taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households.
Our fundamental problem is not that we don't tax Jeff Bezos. It's that we don't tax the people who have multiple boxes of Chinese goods coming from Amazon to their houses every day.
100% agree! I find quite concerning that this point is not immediate in any conversation about AI or robots impacting the number of jobs, and the subsequent conversation about innovating new taxes. AI and robots are capital as any other automation on a factory, and capital gains should be taxed appropriately. This is not a new thing completely separate from the untouchable status quo wrt existing taxes. If it tickles your political kneejerk, explore that, but playing tax sci-fi is distracting and thus dangerous.