South Korea Moves Towards The World's First 'Robot Tax' (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: It's being called the world's first robot tax. If it goes into effect, South Korea will be the first country to change its tax laws in recognition of the coming burden of mass robotic automation on low and middle-skill workers. The change proposed by the Moon Jae-in administration isn't a direct tax on robots. Rather, policymakers have proposed limiting tax incentives on investments in automation... Under existing law, South Korean companies that buy automation equipment, such as warehouse and factory robots, can deduct between three and seven percent of their investment. The current proposal, which seems likely to advance, is to reduce the deduction rate by up to two percentage points.

The move is evidently not an attempt to staunch companies from adopting automation technology. Rather, it is a kind of formal acknowledgment that unemployment is coming on a big enough scale to eat into South Korea's tax revenue. Policymakers are hoping that reducing the deduction incentives by a couple percentage points will offset the lost income tax and help keep the country's social services and welfare coffers filled.
The Korea Times, which broke the story, reminds readers that former U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has called robot taxes "profoundly misguided... A sufficiently high tax on robots would prevent them from being produced."

Comments

Re: What unemployment?

[Anonymous Coward]

The trick to a good economy is to address your problems before they are provlems.

Maybe it makes sense

[jandersen]

As robots become ever more able to function independently and replace human workers, perhaps they should be regarded less as mere tools and more like workers - who deserve a salary and need to pay tax? I know, we are still far from having achieving anything like human-comparable robots, but it is not hard to argue that we will get there one day. In the meantime, although companies have a short term goal of making as much money from as small an expense as possible, they too are dependent on there being customers, which ultimately depends on there being humans (for the near future at least) and a functioning society etc. Otherwise, making money makes no sense at all - so in the long term, all businesses must have an interest in paying taxes to support society.

Re:Maybe it makes sense

[Opportunist]

This is basically the reason why we're currently in the recession we're in: We're producing without paying the people supposed to buy the stuff we produce. This is not going to work in the long run.

In the past, this was the reason our system worked. Companies paid their workers, who then in turn went and bought the products. That way the system worked. This changed radically when we started developing and producing abroad where we ship money away and get goods in return. It's a bit like back in the colonial days... only in reverse. This time, we're sending out our precious metals in return for trinkets and glass beads.

Of course such a system is not sustainable. At a certain point we are no longer able to spend. That point has actually been reached about a decade ago, now it's propped up with more and more debt. And this will continue until the country sending us the beads and trinkets has enough of a domestic market to sell to.

Then... well, why bother with the colony any more when there's nothing to be siphoned from it? Pay your debt and then we'll talk!