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Robots should be taxed INITIALLY

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发表于 2017-9-29 02:48:24 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
Robots are coming for us or, rather, for our jobs.

British politician Jeremy Corbin said this week he wants to tax companies that replace human jobs with robots to offset the negative effects of automation. The Labour leader said in a speech he wants to “manage” robotics and technology “for the benefit of society as a whole.”

He is the latest to suggest a tax on robots. With artificial intelligence and machine learning on the rise, automation is set to eliminate 25 million jobs by 2027, impacting service and manufacturing industries the most. Researchers from Northwestern University wrote in recent paper “Should Robots be Taxed?” distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Our analysis suggests that without changes to the current U.S. tax system, a sizable fall in the costs of automation would lead to a massive rise in income inequality,” they wrote. “We find that income inequality can be reduced by raising marginal tax rates and taxing robots.”

The idea of taxing robots was previously proposed by Microsoft MSFT, +0.03%  co-founder Bill Gates, who said the robots that take human jobs should pay taxes. The European Union also considered legislation to tax robot owners and put funds toward training workers who lose their jobs to automation, but ultimately rejected it.

In “Should Robots be Taxed,” researchers analyzed how robots could be taxed under the U.S. system and determined a lump-sum rebate independent of income would best slow the effects of automation. The amount robots should be taxed depends on how many jobs have been taken over by robots, the researchers concluded. This formula would work only for a society in which jobs have been partially automated, they argued. Employers of the robots would pay these rebates to the government to ensure a minimum income for all workers.

Daron Acemoglu, a professor of economics at MIT, said these emerging problems underscore a need to reexamine U.S. tax code and the value it places on capital over labor.. Buying a $1 million machine that replaces a worker whose career would have cost $1 million over the next 10 years results in tax deductions due to interest expense, he noted.


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As more jobs become automated, those tax deductions on capital should be reduced, he said. “The U.S. tax code massively subsidizes capital relative to labor,” he said. “It’s much more important to start a dialogue about fixing these distortions in the U.S. tax system.”

Once there is full automation, the government should not tax robots, the Northwestern University researchers wrote. “Routine workers do not work, so taxing robots distorts production decisions without reducing income inequality,” they said.

Others agree. Taxing robots is only a short-term solution, said Johannes Moenius, director at the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis. “Taxing robots will reduce income inequality during the transition to a more automated society, no doubt,” he said. “But for the income and wealth inequality issue, it is simply the wrong tool.”

He likened taxing robots to taking food from your kids’ plates in order to prevent them from growing too fast. Ultimately, you can’t stop them growing. Nor should you want them to stop growing. “If robots are the lowest cost or highest quality means to producing something, we want to use them to grow the pie as fast as possible,” he said.

Whether or not you tax robots comes down to the classic economic debate of investing in capital versus labor, said Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at personal-finance site Bankrate.com. Currently, jobs most at risk to robots include administrative, retail and fast food workers. But even career paths requiring higher education will eventually be affected.

Tax alone won’t bridge the inequality gap, Hamrick said. Instead, he suggested retraining people to prepare them for the massive shift in human labor to automated labor.
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