How the Fleshbag Tax Base is Shrinking and the Robot Tax Base Can and Should Take its Place.

How about this — don’t tax humans any more at all. Humans are here to enjoy our lives, robots are here to serve us. As a society and as a species we’ve built infrastructure, machines, and computers to do our bidding. Currently the US Tax base is based 80% on taxing people through the income tax and the payroll tax.

But the population is steady and human labor is shrinking, so the human tax base is necessarily shrinking. At the same time, computers, Artificial Intelligence, and automated robots and drones are growing like crazy. Economists predict long term growing unemployment. Leading technologists such as Stephen Hawkings and Peter Thiel are warning the world that we are going to “stumble into AI” with potentially dire consequences.

But how do you tax the robots? Meet BOB the robot: he is a Tesla assembly line welder bot. You can’t tax BOB because BOB doesn’t get a pay stub. But BOB and worker bots like him make up more and more of the economy’s output. So how do you tax BOB and robots and algorithms like him? Here are three ways to shift the tax burden to robots:

1. Robotic Gains Tax

A “Capital Gains Tax” is basically the same as a Robot Gains Tax. If a legion of robots last year created 10,000 widgets and this year makes 20,000 widgets, the “Capital Gains” would be 10,000 widgets. Generally this is considered a tax on wealthy humans, but already the vast majority of stock market activity is done by algorithms and very soon corporations will be largely run by AI. So let’s just call a spade a spade.

Obama recently presented a plan to raise capital gains from 15% to 28%. A good first step.

2. Robotic Corporate Taxes

Robots are largely owned by corporations, not by individuals or families. Hence a corporate tax is essentially a tax on the automated algorithms and robots owned by that corporation. Unfortunately a corporate tax rate is also seen as a “tax on rich people” when it is really a tax on robots. It has been falling for the past few decades.

It is hip these days to say “Why tax corporations, they make jobs?” But this is bupkis when you realize that corporations are just dying for robots to replace all their pesky, expensive, demanding fleshbag workers. Let’s jack up the corporate tax rate.

3. Robot Financial Sales Tax

When humans buy clothes, groceries, gas, etc they pay 4–6% sales tax, but when a high frequency trading algorithm buys and sells a trillion shares of stock A or B in one day, it pays nothing. This is sheer insanity.

Today all business is based on technology, the sale and purchase of stock is an expression of the value of the robots and algorithms that largely run and do the work of a company. It makes sense we should have a sales tax on stocks, bonds, and fancy ‘exotic’ derivatives that these robots are slinging around every day. The size and shape of this sales tax I leave to economists and such types.

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