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At 19 when I started working at a factory which right before my eyes replaced a brigade of humans with big machines which were all operated by one human I wonde

by jeena 7y ago

At 19 when I started working at a factory which right before my eyes replaced a brigade of humans with big machines which were all operated by one human I wondered why we're not taxing the machine work as we taxed the human work before. I still haven't found a answer to that. Don't the humans lose a lot of tax income when machines replace humans? And couldn't that money pay the replaced humans at least a decent life outside of what we call in German 'Erwerbstätigkeit'? (Google Translate calls it 'gainful employment', no idea if it's the right translation. What I mean is work for which you're getting paid money which you need to use to survive.)

Kalium 7y ago
We do tax them! We tax the value of the factory, we tax the company's profits, and we tax the goods the robots when they are sold. The robots were also taxed when they were purchased. As I understand it, the human work probably wasn't directly taxed. I'm guessing that what was taxed as the incomes of the humans. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but the humans have other opportunities to earn taxable incomes. All that said, you seem to be getting at the notion of a Universal Basic Income. It's an increasingly popular idea in some political circles.
- rajampoc 7y ago
  Human work is taxed. It's called the income tax. There's little opportunity to earn money by working and avoid income taxes.
  - mreome 7y ago
    You can do any kind of work without pay and you don't get taxed. If you do nothing all day but are paid for it, you still get taxed. Income tax taxes income, not work. I think the point Kalium was trying to make is that it's not possible to quantify the value of human labor without pinning it to the income someone earns from doing it. A programmer's job is less physically labor intensive then a farm worker's, who obviously earns less. And there are numerous skills and fields more complex then programming that nobody will pay as much, or at all, for someone to do. For a machine, it's value is directly tied to the profits gained by it's operation relative to it's operating costs, which is the business income that is already taxed. I think the taxing of machine "work" jeena was asking for would basically just be an increase in taxes on corporate profits, perhaps with some variation based on how many people they employ relative to their profits.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

by jeena 7y ago

Kalium 7y ago

We do tax them! We tax the value of the factory, we tax the company's profits, and we tax the goods the robots when they are sold. The robots were also taxed when they were purchased. As I understand it, the human work probably wasn't directly taxed. I'm guessing that what was taxed as the incomes of the humans. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but the humans have other opportunities to earn taxable incomes. All that said, you seem to be getting at the notion of a Universal Basic Income. It's an increasingly popular idea in some political circles.

rajampoc 7y ago
Human work is taxed. It's called the income tax. There's little opportunity to earn money by working and avoid income taxes.
- mreome 7y ago
  You can do any kind of work without pay and you don't get taxed. If you do nothing all day but are paid for it, you still get taxed. Income tax taxes income, not work. I think the point Kalium was trying to make is that it's not possible to quantify the value of human labor without pinning it to the income someone earns from doing it. A programmer's job is less physically labor intensive then a farm worker's, who obviously earns less. And there are numerous skills and fields more complex then programming that nobody will pay as much, or at all, for someone to do. For a machine, it's value is directly tied to the profits gained by it's operation relative to it's operating costs, which is the business income that is already taxed. I think the taxing of machine "work" jeena was asking for would basically just be an increase in taxes on corporate profits, perhaps with some variation based on how many people they employ relative to their profits.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]