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EU Commissioner Says No to Bill Gates' Robot Tax Idea (fortune.com)
Andrus Ansip, the European Commissioner in charge of the Digital Single Market, has said that he does not support Bill Gates' idea of taxing robots that replace human workers. From a report: Microsoft founder Gates made an argument for robots incurring taxes equivalent to that worker's income taxes during an interview in February. "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed," 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." But Ansip has made it clear that he is not in favor of a robot tax. Speaking during a CNBC-hosted panel at the Pioneers tech conference in Vienna on Thursday, Ansip said the "aim of taxation is not just (to) collect revenues... but to increase salaries of teachers and police," CNBC reports. "No way. No way," he added, when asked if he would support the tax.
A reduction in tax income means a reduction in overall ability for the gov to spend... which in turn means smaller money pot to pay teachers and police.
I'm sure they'll find another way, such as property tax rates for commercial vs personal.
Government relies on income and sales taxes to disproportionate degree. With robots taking over, there won't be enough money to support social programs or even local government. We will quickly get to unified world government, but it will be controlled by multinationals that own these robots.
Robots don't need diapers, Newports and Schlitz every other Friday.
Perhaps he'll suggest that they just have to eat cake if there is no bread....
I do understand why not: taxing robots, would keep industry and production out of Europe. Evidently, if robot work is taxed in the EU, the robots will be put in non-EU countries, including the few non-robot workers who still do pay taxes... Not good for the economy (well, until nobody can buy goods any more, of course).
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
That for every job a robot replaces, that company has to pay benefits equivalent to the wages they were receiving for the job they used to have. Also the same for outsourcing jobs.
Where can i get in on that???
The EU took the right stance. Even Yanis Varoufakis has said that the idea of taxing robots does not work. This is what needs to be done instead: https://www.weforum.org/agenda...
I'm going to point at all you fools and laugh myself silly when robots don't take everyones' jobs.
Even Chicken Little is going to point and laugh derisively, shaking his chicken-head sadly at how dumb humans can be.
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Then there are some people who, for some inexplicable reason, just want to run around, waving their arms like madmen, doom-saying like there's no tomorrow.
For some reason they seem to be the same people who obsessively correct peoples' grammar and spelling, and nitpick choice of one word over another in a sentence. Anyone got any ideas on why that is?
Automation saves the company money. They have to pay taxes on that increased revenue. Since that extra revenue is tagged onto their existing revenue the money gets taxed at a higher level than if it was going to employees.
Bill Gates is right that current tax systems incentivise companies to hire as few workers as possible. But I believe the solution is not a "robot tax", because it's not easy to define what a robot is, how much money it "makes", and automation may not even come in the form of robots. I think the best solution would be to abandon the income tax altogether, relying instead on corporate and sales taxation.
When even the tax-happy EU decides against passing It.
The European Commissioner in charge of the Digital Single Market
Can be replaced by a robot.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Is related to robot tax in *any* way? Does he mean since there will be robots, police and teachers etc will be no longer necessary, thus government expenses will be vastly lower and ensuing gap in income tax will be a non-issue? Or police and teachers will be robots too, so it all cancels out? I just have grave difficulty connecting "we need teachers" (?) and "this is why we must not tax robots" in logically coherent manner.
More like long-sighted... It's too early to tax this stuff, the robots haven't replaced humans on a large enough scale yet... it's like taxing cars on roads before there are enough cars. Robots replacing crappy jobs is a good thing for everyone, because in the future that means society as a whole is more efficient, the monetary displacement however needs to be corrected after the fact, otherwise you are removing the incentive for that shift to take place.
so if excel spreadsheets replace a beancounting human does that mean the government can tax anyone who uses ms office at the rate of some theoretical out of work accountant? gates may be a devilishly aggressive businessman, but he's a fucking retarded when it comes to technology and society. steven hawking is another microspecialist who feels he can insert himself into the a.i. conversation despite having no background in it whatsoever. just stop.
and the factories will move to south Sudan where the robot tax is 0
Oh, you don't favor a tax to increase education (which is rather highly-valued in the EU?)
That's almost guaranteed to be your ass there.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
... you're not the taxman.
Do not cometh and please shut the fuck up.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Import tariffs....
Hypothetically let's consider a robot tax.
-what exactly would constitute a "robot" for tax definition?
Would it be any automated machine that costs a minimum of 1 human job?
would they retroactively go back and tax equipment that has been doing that since the dawn of industrialization?
(Even something as commonplace as an elevator for example technically can be considered a "job-taking robot". -not to mention many common appliances and machines)
The moment you start "grandfathering" exemptions you get massive loopholes -and easily won lawsuits for those on the threshold of exemption.
This would create a huge bureaucracy and a new tax-code spanning multiple volumes just to determine eligibility
Maybe that's the answer to the loss of jobs. More government positions, more lawyers and paralegals and more educators to train them all.
Yes, don't tax robots. Cronies like that idea.
Humans pay property taxes on their houses, but cronies don't have to pay property taxes on their property (robots).
Will they also include self-driving cars in this definition of robot? Yup! Cronies must be enriched.
meanwhile, you who are still lucky to have a job, bend over! You're paying more taxes!
Switch to a flat tax (a lower rate than is charged now) with one deduction allowed: Wages paid to US resident workers.
Have gnu, will travel.
A little voice in my head says he will reverse trend, and eat those words in 5 years.
and at least read the Wikipedia page. There were decades of unemployment & social strife following the industrial revolution until two World Wars thinned the herd and tech caught up a bit. History is not on your side. We're already seeing massive underemployment due to productivity increases. The auto companies are laying folks off because they're making more cars than people can buy (e.g. too much inventory).
When you see a smoldering pile of dried twigs during a drought you shouldn't just move along. Do something or the whole forest will burn.
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...then who is going to pay our living expenses?
Lol the captcha :Beggary ... lmao!
Robots with Bitcoins (or Ether) can biuy their products.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
that tax would have been ridiculous. If you're gonna tax robots than you should also tax calculators and other automated processes..
Far better to simply implement a VAT on the production and services and be done with it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Do you also insist on eating from hand plowed fields, and goods carried to the store by hand ?
Lets see what he thinks once he's out of a job and the "robot" increases taxes and decreases his social security unemployment net.
The sad fact is governments already inhale productivity increases by keeping borrowing proportional to GDP.
So...taxing robots directly will slow their adoption, which will slow the GDP increase, which will slow the ability to borrow hand over fist from your grandchildren in order to hand out goodies to the current voting generation that have little to do with war or infrastructure, the old-fashioned, quaint idea of things it was moral to borrow from future generations for, because it benefited them.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What robots are we taxing? Multipurpose vehicles with automation features? Automated soldering robot arms in vehicle factories? Software with neural networks for sorting large quantities of data? On demand 3D printers? An Excel spreadsheet? Weaving loom? An abbacus?
See where I'm geting at? There is no clear and consistent definition of what a robot is. If it's about machines taking jobs that could be done by humans, it's every single tool since the dawn of times. If it's about specific sets of machinery that uses neural networks, AI-related stuff and whatnot, the industry will find ways of going around the definition just to avoid taxes. And most of industrial automation can work plenty well without onboard AI anyways. More importantly, if one country decides to tax robots, all it takes is another country that does not to send all production there. In a way, this has already happened with labor laws, welfare, copyright and whatnot going from the entire world to China.
Bill Gates seems to be well intended, but this isn't how we're gonna solve this problem, because it's too vague.
How about a profit x employability tax? This is sure to piss off even more people, specially companies like Microsoft, Google and whatnot. But if it's about taxing companies that are making a lot of money and having tons of output without generating employment, even if this sounds like an extra burden or punishment for success, it should be going that way instead of vague strategies that every business will be expected to do everything they can to avoid.
Yes, it incur in similar problems of big businesses fleeing the country for others that don't work that way, but at least it's more general and spread throughout the entire economy.
I suggest you vote for the most left leaning candidate you can get. Look up the Justice Democrats if you're in the states. Tell everyone you know to do the same. Take care of the poor and make sure they're fed, clothed and given healthcare and housing. Otherwise a demagogue/populist will organize them against you like they did in WWII.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The era of income tax to finance governments is nearing its end.
So How do you propose to make up for the lack of it when when 40 50% of the population becomes unemployable. Genocide?
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