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Robots That Steal Human Jobs Should Pay Taxes, Gates Says

posted by on Sunday February 19 2017, @05:49PM   
from the robots-are-not-covered-by-the-sixteenth-amendment dept.

"exec" writes:

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world's richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes.

"Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things," he said. "If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think that we'd tax the robot at a similar level."

Gates made the remark during an interview with Quartz. He said robot taxes could help fund projects like caring for the elderly or working with children in school. Quartz reported that European Union lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robots in the past. The law was rejected.

Recode, citing a McKinsey report, said that 50 percent of jobs performed by humans are vulnerable to robots, which could result in the loss of about $2.7 trillion in the U.S. alone.

"Exactly how you'd do it, measure it, you know, it's interesting for people to start talking about now," Gates said. "Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly in some type of robot tax. I don't think the robot companies are going to be outraged that there might be a tax. It's OK."

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/02/18/robots-that-steal-human-jobs-should-pay-taxes-gates-says.html

-- submitted from IRC

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Original Submission

• Amusing... (Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Sunday February 19 2017, @07:09PM

  by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Sunday February 19 2017, @07:09PM (#469032) Homepage Journal

  I find the whole discussion rather amusing.

  According to the St. Louis Fed [stlouisfed.org]:

  Consumer spending accounts for a majority of spending in all advanced nations. What makes the U.S. experience of recent decades unusual is that the share of consumer spending in GDP was relatively high already before it began to increase substantially further during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. In dollar terms, PCE's share of GDP in the third quarters of 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007 were 62.5, 65.9, 66.7 and 69.5 percent, respectively.

  Given that nearly 70% of economic activity in the US is consumer spending, replacing workers and driving down wages seems to be something of a mistake on the part of industry. Should the trend toward lower wage jobs and reducing numbers of good (i.e., a living wage or even a comfortable income) paying jobs continue, reduced consumer spending will have serious negative consequences on the economy as a whole.

  I get it, individual companies are beholden to their shareholders to maximize profits, and many companies are regularly beaten with the quarterly earnings growth [thefreedictionary.com] cudgel.

  As to Bill Gates, he's talking out of his ass and it smells that way too. Even if, somehow, the US Congress (a wholly owned subsidiary of Corporate USA) were to tax the use of robots, even at a comparable rate to humans performing the same work, this would not inject that money back into the economy in the same way as consumer spending.

  Regardless, we're on a path that will likely have seriously negative consequences for the US economy over the medium and long term. I just hope I don't live long enough to see these problems destroy us.

  --
  No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr

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