Taxing robots: SF supervisor wants California to talk about it

Re:Taxing robots: SF supervisor wants California to talk abo... by payne92 on Sunday August 27, 2017 @08:03PM (#15113550)

tl;dr: A SF supervisor 'launched the "Jobs of the Future Fund", a crowdfunding effort to raise money to nudge the state to study the issue of what will happen to human workers in the age of automation.'

The fundamental problem: what's a "robot"?

We've been developing labor-saving devices and technologies since the dawn of civilization. Where's the line where a device becomes taxable?

Roomba? Teslas? A tractor? Looms? Machine tools? Drones? Printing presses? Teleprompters? Automated tomato sorting machines?

I'm all for figuring out the future where there are many unemployed workers because there are no longer enough labor jobs. But if we're taxing labor replacement, we might as well just raise the sales tax.

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Re:Taxing robots: SF supervisor wants California to talk abo... by slindz on Monday August 28, 2017 @01:13AM (#15114527)

I'm not sure I understand your sales tax suggestion.

Wouldn't a sales tax increase punish the consumers losing their jobs?

Doesn't the increase in taxation have to come from business revenues in some way as a means to offset the reduction in consumer job income?

update: I may be looking at the problem as too much as a closed system (ie. things are made where they're sold). The implications of relocating production to areas with different taxation rules make an ideal solution very tricky.

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