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Do These Idiots Know What They’re Doing?
Yep, there are politicians who think we should tax robots which replace workers to make up for lost taxes. Here’s a pull quote:
“A robot that replaces a factory worker who produces say, $50,000 of work annually, should be taxed at the same level to offset losses in income and Social Security taxes, [Bill] Gates calculates.”
Insanity. The left boosts the minimum wage, which either closes businesses outright or results in automation being used to replace workers. Now governments are looking at taxing C3PO who is now making fries in a Seattle McDonald’s. If businesses cannot escape the minimum wage law by replacing workers with robots, the businesses will cease to exist, period.
Way to go, leftists. Way to go . . .
Published in Technology
It is driving me ape s—. Please take it down.
I am tired of these piecemeal social justice gestures. What we need is to replace most federal agencies with a single cadre of about 500,000 federal administrators authorized to change wages, prices and anything else they find unfair. These persons, let’s call them Fairies of Justice will be issued wands (called “Beto Baton”)symbolizing their unrestricted authority.
Which raises the question:
Will a sex robot hire a lawyer robot to represent her?
He forgot the trigger warning . . .
In Roman times instead of the “Beto Baton”, they were called the fasces. If they also contained axes with the bundles of rods, the Roman officials bearing these could also dispense the death penalty.
Re 2.
What do they do with the robot that is not replacing a worker, but is installed to do a task that previously was not done because the cost of a human worker would have made the task uneconomical? Base the tax on the theoretical and uneconomical use of human labor?
What if automation increases employment? Some years ago I worked for a company that increased the automation of certain manufacturing functions. By doing so, the product was made more reliable than prior versions (and than competitors’) and increased the total market for the product so that the company had to run more manufacturing lines than before to meet demand, resulting in more total workers working at the plant.
Imagine the effects of such a tax if it had been implemented 150 years ago. Since mechanized farm equipment reduced the need for farm labor, taxing mechanized farm equipment would discourage such equipment, and more of us might be following a horse drawn plow and hoisting bales of hay into barn lofts instead of doing what we are doing now. [I know some Ricochetti enjoy their farm work, but many of us are happy that someone else does that work, and often does it efficiently with expensive mechanized and automated equipment.]
I’m not picking on @stad and I recognize that many of the comments here are fun. But the concept is has so many inherent flaws, and it annoys me that people who propose stuff like that concept have not even thought about the basic terms.
A “technotax” on labor-replacing machinery was proposed in the 1930s as a way of dealing with technologically-driven unemployment. And there were indeed a lot of advances in automation going on, for example:
A Columbia researcher named Elizabeth Baker suggested that Say’s Law (increased productivity will drive increased demand) had held true until the 20th century, but no more. One of the workers she interviewed had twice lost jobs to technology: his job as a pianist in a movie theater had been eliminated by the coming of the ‘talkies,’ and his replacement job feeding paper into printing presses had been eliminated by automatic feeders. Baker found that there were more printing-industry jobs, and higher prestige, for pressmen and mechanics…but the lower-skilled printing assistant was “threatened with extinction.”
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/54256.html
I don’t feel picked on at all!
First paragraph:
The IRS and other government agencies are good at calculating “imputed income”. I suspect this will be the case here.
Second paragraph:
Some automation does increase employment. However, labor tends to be the largest expense for many businesses. Replacing a human with a cost-effective robot would be a boon for the bottom line. Like cigarettes, the government doesn’t want to ban the product, just tax it for revenue (after all, those out-of-work people aren’t producing income which can be taxed).
Third paragraph:
I’ve often thought slavery would have died out in the South due to mechanization of agriculture. As for “what if”, we could go on for hours!
The good news is that if you have a little cyborg with her, joint custody is a simple medical procedure.
And a metronome.
Tax the hammer. Tax the automobile. Anything that increases productivity is suspect!
Coincidentally, I watched the Hoover Institution’s recent lecture on AI. The speakers proposed that, rather than the usual talk of robot workers, we should be thinking about AI like calculation software or even electricity. AI is a force multiplier.
It won’t replace human workers so often as augment human abilities by way of automating perception of complex situations to quickly produce actionable data. An example is how many people work for Amazon, processing and shipping more goods with AI assistance than they could achieve on their own. The lecturers believe that AI, like electricity, will transform nearly every industry.
It’s not an accident. It’s an attempt to make our country communist. They mistakenly believe, as so many before them, that they will be at the top when the change comes about.
A front end loader replaces lots of men with shovels so let’s tax that. A printer replaces many scribes so… And that pesky ATM.
Eliminate direct dial and have every phone call go through operators again.
Skyler: “It’s not an accident. It’s an attempt to make our country communist.”
We are in a economic war of world domination with the ChiComs, who btw have invested trillions into robots and automation. ( We can thank Helo Ben Bernacke for that who got all the major Central Banks hooked on QE and which allowed the ChiComs to exploit it in a monumental way with a $50 trillion dollar QE that allowed them to buy up everything in sight and subsidize automation on a massive trillion dollar scale to out compete with us.)
We live in a competitive world, where the most competitive wins. So the idea to curtail automation here and reduce our competitiveness is really at it’s root just another Deep State/ DictatorshipCrat ploy to give the ChiComs the upper hand and to bring ruin to America. And yes to bring about a communist revolution.
In the early part of my career I designed hundreds of small manufacturing plants and once in a while a bigger one. Small manufacturing start-ups can’t afford robots and automation. Automation is best suited to a very well financed Corporate entity with access to the equity markets and a product line that is mature enough so that it isn’t constantly changing which would otherwise make that shiny new million dollar robot you just bought worthless because your new design doesn’t work with it.
Most new innovation occurs with these small start-ups, of which the Deep State and the Corporatists have tried to destroy at every turn. While Trump has reduced much of the most pernicious regulation at the Federal level , there still is a horrendous amount of destructive regulation at the State and Local level, and in the financial realm that hamstrings a tremendous amount of innovation and American competitiveness. Much more needs to be done to truly unleash America’s innovative potential.
All that said, automation will come when it will come if we let the free market have it’s way. The more we limit small business, enact high minimum wages and enact unnecessary regulation, the more likely you will have automation take away jobs, because automation will come mostly in industries dominated by large corporate interests that are not innovating and that have the wherewithal to automate.
I worked as a manufacturing engineer at several companies. My entire job description was always to reduce costs, and the biggest hanging fruit was always labor. But in the end, increased productivity, and maintaining automation almost always led to greater quality at higher output, so head count always stayed about the same or increased. As did profits.
I thought “productivity” was heteronormative racist code for capitalist oppression. You make it sound like a good thing.
Well, I have practiced business law quite efficiently without employing a “secretary” (as legal assistants were once quaintly called) since about 2009, thanks to the personal computer, Microsoft and others’ specialized software apps, laser printers, and more recently scanning technology.
Of course, if that tech-reliant productivity were to be taxed based on the salaries I’d have had to pay staff and the printers over nearly 10 years, my solo practice would never have shown a profit.
Oh, wait. I get it. The plan is to destroy all ability to make a profit.
There is a tax. Ita called a corporate income tax. Its just politicians dont like losing the thriple tax they get. Instead of only gettimg double taxation. Less labor means less income taxes and sales tax. You know what. If we got rid of income tax there would not be an issue anymore.
Yep! I make this point all the time. Microsoft Office has “replaced” millions of secretaries, just as surely as industrial robots replace assembly workers.
I entered the workforce in the 1980s as part of the first generation of computer-literate graduates. We had no use for secretaries, even though the department had them. The middle managers in the Silicon Valley company I worked for were surprised at this, but understood.
One day they went into a long-term staffing planning meeting with upper management. They told the high-level managers that there would be reduced need for secretaries going forward, because none of the young workers wanted to use them. The high-level managers didn’t believe them!
Heteronormative is a good thing. I don’t apologize for that.
Skyler: “I worked as a manufacturing engineer at several companies. My entire job description was always to reduce costs, and the biggest hanging fruit was always labor. But in the end, increased productivity, and maintaining automation almost always led to greater quality at higher output, so head count always stayed about the same or increased. As did profits. “
Any good manufacturing concern will always be looking for increased productivity which certainly includes looking at automation. All I was saying is that manufacturing concerns need to reach a certain market penetration and financial heft to be seriously in the automation game, and as a corollary mature concerns like fast food conglomerates with access to the financial markets will automate quicker in this environment of rising minimum wages.
I also am involved in a manufacturing concern. We have one robot for work no human could perform, and will not be looking to increase automation until we reach much more of the market in order to afford it. Financing for small companies is a big problem with the due diligence and the profitability track record required by banks.
One reason why I’m for the Fair Tax (it’s more than just a Federal sales tax).
Technological innovation will always be ongoing. The question is, “What is the driver?”
If the driver is to avoid taxes, we may not get the best results. If the driver is to improve the lives of people doing the work, then we may get good results.
For example, construction equipment replaced dozens of workers doing the same task by hand with both good (easier tasks for those employed) and bad (excess workers laid off). The same goes with automation on the assembly line. In these cases, the overall effect has been good.
When job wages are tax or minimum wage driven, you get ordering kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food places (soon to be joined by burger-flipping robots). Here, the effect is bad because what few remaining low-income, low-skilled level jobs start to vanish, and these are the entry-level positions needed for teens and some adults to grab that first rung on the ladder . . .
My first professional job was at a law firm in 1981, just after the firm started using computerized word processors (and before any of us lawyers were computer-literate). The firm partners assumed the computerized word processors would reduce the need for secretaries. That didn’t happen. Instead of using fewer secretary hours to prepare the same number of drafts of documents, the lawyers used the same number of secretary hours to prepare more drafts of the documents to produce a better final document.
I know the specific example is no longer relevant, but I wonder how often the principle plays out – instead of machines leading to fewer workers, the machines allow (at least initially) the same number of workers to produce better product.
I saw the same thing back in the late 80’s and 90’s in the military. Word processors didn’t make life easier, they made it more tedious because now reports could be more elaborate. Work expands to fill the time available, and there’s always a colonel out there who doesn’t think you need sleep.
Before copiers and scanners and email, companies did not keep multiple copies voluminous records so lawyers did not have the opportunity to create vastly expensive discovery battles and create an entire industry of document handling, tagging and searching. Technology giveth and technology taketh away but not to and from the same folks.
Even with word processors, engineers are notoriously bad when it comes to grammar and spelling. We still needed secretaries – Face slap! – administrative assistants . . .
On the other hand, electronic format makes it a *lot* easier to search those documents efficiently and quickly.
Which is probably why during the probe of Hillary’s emails, she printed them all out and handed over boxes of paper instead of just copying them all to a thumbdrive.
Who the [redacted] running that case let her get away with *that*? That act alone should have gotten her tossed in a cell for contempt.
I am against the fair tax because it would screw small businesses and US business over. However a flat rate VAT tax while making income tax illegal again is the way to go. We would not need tarrifs becuase the VAT would act as a tarrif. The only conplexty would the rules for inter company sales/tranfers across US borders. Howerver it would not be any more complex than the current tarrif rules on those types of movements.