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Corporations used to hire typists that could use a typewriter to type up copies of letters and memos. They'd have a room of 100 typists all typing away all day
by orionblastar 11y ago
Corporations used to hire typists that could use a typewriter to type up copies of letters and memos. They'd have a room of 100 typists all typing away all day for 8+ hours a day for five days a week.
That is until the Word Processor and Laser Printer caught on and then they only needed 1 person to press 100 copies on the Word Processor after typing up the letter and memo. Learning how a PC works and how a Word Processor works requires a higher level skill than a typewriter.
I used to work for a law firm IT department. I was given a series of tasks to automate forms into electric forms that were ASP web based and use Crystal Reports to export to RTF, PDF, XLS format etc. I did my job and the people who used to do the reports by hand got fired. They got replaced with an web app that worked 24/7 for free and stores data on a MS-SQL Server database.
I felt really bad that what I wrote had cost jobs.
Consider web sites that work 24/7 selling items, they put retail stores to be closed and people who work those retail jobs to be fired. Macy's closed down stores near my house and fired people, and my wife orders her dresses from macys.com instead of going to a store now.
Now you might say you need to learn some IT skills to service and support websites and technical issues, but they offshore that work to India and China for cheaper labor. Anything needed on US soil they can hire H1B Visa Workers for cheaper than US citizens to work those jobs. So yes jobs are being created, but some of those jobs goes to foreign workers who can work for a lower cost of labor.
Yes we need a basic income and support it by taxing corporations who use automated programs, AI, and robots to do the jobs that human beings used to do. Also tax the companies that use foreign labor to save on costs. It is because those companies cost native jobs when they do that.
Unemployment only counts those on unemployment insurance, not those who lost unemployment insurance because it ran out or those who ended up on welfare or disability because they couldn't find work.
We have a lot of qualified IT workers with student loan debt who cannot find a job in this country. But they are refused to be hired for silly reasons, or considered overqualified to hire H1b Visa Workers instead.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dwiel 11y agohow do you tax based on the use of automated programs, AI and robots? Robots are sort of the easiest, maybe you tax their purchase? Or some kind of yearly 'property' tax on them. What is a robot though? A fax machine? A dish washer? Taxing automated programs and AI doesn't make any sense to me. You mention that they should be taxed on jobs they've replaced. But what if those jobs never excited in the first place? Should google pay taxes based on how many people it would take to browse the entire internet all the time and track the changes in websites they find? I'm not completely opposed to the idea of some kind of tax, but I just don't see how it can be reasonably framed. Do you have any specific ideas?
- JesperRavn 11y agoCurrent taxation (e.g. income tax) should be completely fine. The government needs money to redistribute to people who are not doing well financially for any reason. But there is no particular reason to be more generous to people whose poverty is due to technological advancement. As you say, having a job at a given time is a very poor rationale for deserving that job in the future. We know that technological growth increases the total amount of wealth to go around. If it didn't, companies wouldn't adopt new technologies. The only problem is when technology widens wealth disparities, which is what taxation is there fore in the first place.
- ende 11y agoTaxing income only hurts those who do have jobs. The solution is a Land Value Tax.
- JesperRavn 11y agoBut tax has to hurt someone, and having a job is the least discriminatory way to assign this. Income is a measure of how fast your wealth is growing, and so by taking a proportion of your income, the government takes a proportion of your wealth. I don't have time to argue (just like you probably don't have time to present a full argument for your side) but the Land Value Tax is based on outdated and wrong economics. Unfortunately because land value tax is so far from the mainstream, there is very little work in mainstream economics directly critiquing the land value tax. I can only summarize the reasons for it as follows - Economic theory suggests that the most efficient tax is income tax, because income tax is the least discriminatory. - Some people like Piketty also recommend a wealth tax, and I agree that a wealth tax might also be useful. - A land tax would immediately impact the price of all land, since that land will have to pay tax in the future. Therefore the people who bear the impact of the land tax, is whoever owns land when the tax is introduced. That doesn't seem reasonable or fair.
- jwatte 11y agoTaxing the most efficient? Sound like Luddite thinking to me. Instead, figure out how to best harness the human power that is released!