[mikeyouse]

My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth.

What in the history of our world gives anyone faith that those companies are going to start paying taxes instead of using "AGI" to engineer increasingly complex methods to avoid them so that their equity owners can pocket the profits?

https://itep.org/trump-meta-tesla-alphabet-amazon-obbba-taxe... - "The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero"

[Marha01]

> My great annoyance with all this blather about UBI and post-scarcity and new economic models is that it relies on taxing and redistributing the ~infinite profits of the largest tech companies on earth.

The arrival of true AGI and human-level robots will likely result in very strong deflation, since robotic factories will flood the market with goods produced for far cheaper than those in factories with human workers.

At that point, you don't need taxation. The government can just print the money for UBI. It would have to print the money anyway, to combat the massive deflation.

[hackinthebochs]

As long as the proles have a monopoly on force (through their representative government), the AI companies will pay taxes. The question is how long does this state of affairs last.

[ralfd]

Optimal corporate taxes are zero (or close to it) anyway, same as tariffs.

Aside from that the link explains that the BBB traded tax income for „accelerated depreciation of assets“ aka economic growth.

Asode from that, even if one disagrees with the first statement or the Trumpism economics, there are 195 countries in the world and quite a few will be willing to tax foreign (enemy) tech companies. See the new hostility of EU against american tech.

[mikeyouse]

> Optimal corporate taxes are zero (or close to it) anyway, same as tariffs.

From a purely theoretical standpoint about the optimal allocation of private goods, that might be true -- but the reality is that when corporate taxes decrease, so do overall revenues because their owners are also engaged in massive tax "avoidance" via many of the same schemes and we don't have any way to effectively collect tax.

As a simple example, to return profits to their owners, companies often engage in stock buybacks to increase their share price instead of paying dividends -- another theoretically 'neutral' choice except that many of the owners of the appreciating stock are international, nonprofit, or in convoluted overseas trusts which 'defer' the tax ad infinitum. We've disastrously and intentionally underfunded our tax enforcement mechanisms so huge portions of those deferred taxes are just never paid. [1]

> Asode from that, even if one disagrees with the first statement or the Trumpism economics, there are 195 countries in the world and quite a few will be willing to tax foreign (enemy) tech companies. See the new hostility of EU against american tech.

Sure, but the tech companies are paying massive bribes to the President of the country where they're domiciled. How on earth are any of these other countries going to enforce international tax obligations on them if they're protected by a nuclear-armed state that's the sole source for AGI?

[1] - https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/publication/...

> "US taxable shareholders strongly prefer buybacks from a US tax perspective, as they tend to reduce their tax liability by 9.3 percentage points, on average. US nontaxable shareholders are indifferent between dividends and buybacks, and foreign shareholders strongly prefer buybacks, which reduces their US tax liability by 14.5 percentage points."