Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.