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by psc
3680 days ago
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>They are productive assets, much like houses produce rent The rent houses produce is very different from the money robots help you make. Rents (in the economic sense) are good to tax, can't be passed on to the tenant, and has no bad distortionary effects. If you tax robots, and don't do anything else, all that does is raise the prices of the goods produced by robots. It harms the consumer the most. If you tax robots enough, you can incentivize the owners to not use robots and hire humans instead. But then we're missing out on all the benefits of having a society where robots do the hard work, there's got to be a better way. One solution would be to tax robots, and redistribute the taxed money back to the consumers. Everyone should benefit from the fruits of automation. This would probably work pretty well. The biggest issue here is that the government isn't known for being very good at redistributing tax revenue. So there are proposals like basic income to keep the process as simple as possible. There are probably even better options, like taxing the rents only, and taxing them very highly, and then paying that out as basic income. Theoretically this might target the people you want to be targeting, without harming the consumers. Obviously, theory only goes so far with this kind of thing. I think the point here is that taxation is tricky, and the burden of a tax is not necessarily on the person/company you're taking the money from. So "tax the robots" might not be the best thing, even though it has populist appeal. |
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Real estate taxes are in principle very similar to taxing a robot. It will be passed on to the consumer.
If you are referring to rental income being taxed (after all costs are deducted) then it is very similar to profits from robot assisted manufacturing being taxed. This will happen in the current tax regime in the US and here both are similarly situated as well.