FINALLY!!!

[peristaltor]

From the NYT, some sanity regarding the completely screwed-up tax laws that are contributing to our growing un- and underemployment problem.

We may not want to tax innovation, but there is no reason to subsidize investments that are designed merely to take away jobs. At the very least, a tax on robots would force businesses to think harder about when and where to deploy them.

This advance of technology into the work-place need not be relegated solely to the robots, as the article notes. Simply define "robot" more generally as a piece of technology that makes a job easier to do and you find that this has been a problem for decades, if not centuries. I may get deep into the weeds of this problem… later.

Comments

[garote]

You might have muddled the lesson from your engineer friend. He is not a programmer; I am. Chances are his job - as it was at the time - was automated by someone like me. And my job, as it has been for the last 25 years or so, has been to automate myself out of a job, over and over, learning the next skillset along the way. Programming is automation. The concept that you will rapidly be out of a job if you keep doing the same thing is built into the career.

(You might think that we will eventually run out of things to automate and the economy for programmers will crash. I don't think so, but that's a whole different discussion. :D )

When you point at "the system" and say it lacks "incentives to keep people fed", I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Automation has obviated various forms of employment forever. Entire industries have crashed and disappeared. Over and over again we've seen displaced people, or the potentially displaced, appeal to the kindness of humanity in general to preserve their particular way of making a living. The most popular solutions have been to tax everyone else to prop up the industry, or tax the industry's replacement to skew the playing field, both of which are deeply unfair and subject to manipulation by lobbyists. E.g. the fucking coal industry. This is economic bloodletting, or in the Republican parlance, this is "choosing winners and losers."

The less popular solution - one I do have support for - is to tax both the new industry and the old, specifically to provide training and temporary unemployment protection for the displaced group. Basically, give them time to find their feet and move on to a different career. This goes hand-in-hand with my more general solution above about emphasizing education, and emphasizing a solution that lets people preserve their dignity.

I think you and I are closer to agreeing than disagreeing. However I don't think the rapid transitions happening today require that we rearrange the fundamentals of our economy. What I would like to see is, an anti-trust hammer and chisel taken to most of the top electronics and software companies in the world. Too much money is flowing into too few areas.

Out of curiosity, what particular "substantial revision to the system of economic incentives" do you have in mind?

[peristaltor]

(You might think that we will eventually run out of things to automate and the economy for programmers will crash. I don't think so, but that's a whole different discussion. :D )

Actually, I do see that as coming, and you've actually articulated the reason it's important.

When you point at "the system" and say it lacks "incentives to keep people fed", I'm not sure exactly what you mean.

The System is the System of Political Economy,* that series of laws and policies that dictates what can be turned into cash and what that cash can buy. When a robot/simpler mechanism performs a task, the monetary value of that task falls; it gets, as you say, "cheaper."

What may not fall is the cost of supporting oneself with dignity and honor.

Thus, we have people who used to make good money able to make only a fraction of that money when they sell their services to the market. Unless they own something of economic value to that market, something that pays them but lets them sit on their rent-receiving butts, their quality of life will fall.

That's what has happened.

At no point in this economic system is someone chronically un- or underemployed seen as worth supporting by anything other than "hand-outs" (Social Security, Disability, Welfare [or what's left of it], charitable giving); meaning giving people a meaningful, honorable profession in the face of jobs being automated out of the economy is not incentivized.

I agree with you that protection rackets isolating endangered industries "are deeply unfair and subject to manipulation by lobbyists." I also agree that "Democratization of the tools of hard and soft engineering should be our mission." Should. But….

As long as patent ownership is allowed to be as effective at generating revenue as feudal lands doled out by a reigning king, that democratization of tools will only be at the hobby level, ie. too small scale to be sold on the market, which will be dominated by concentrated automation surrounded by barriers to market entry.

As long as income is taxed at higher levels than income derived from simply owning an instrument and receiving its boon (dividends, resale value, rental values), those owning what Marx called the "means of production" (I bristle at that for various reasons, but it does the describing job things for now) will dominate our political economy… again, just like they do now. (You provide good examples of that.)

Out of curiosity, what particular "substantial revision to the system of economic incentives" do you have in mind?

I'm not sure exactly how to frame this, but we need:

• a tax policy that allows employers to hire more cheaply than it allows those same employers to obtain equipment that can be used to do if not the same job, then one similar enough to get that same job done;

• laws supporting the ones above that prevent equipment purchases from being monetary investments (that category is complicated to explain, but it's mentioned briefly in the linked article);

• laws that allow people to work less (as more technology is implemented), but still enjoy the same quality of life; and finally

• laws that tax those who manage to accumulate wealth at the most obscene levels no matter what they did to get it get levied the most obscene taxes.

That last one may seem unfair, but we have history to check what happens when wealth gets to levels this obscene. That wealth is inevitably used to pervert the System, allowing even more accumulation, which allows even more System perversion.

This last point also has the benefit of having nothing per se to do with automation. It applies to feudal pre-Revolution France as it does to us today.


*Only People Who Are Wrong separate politics and economics. The two are intrinsically joined, and must always be considered in concert for any considerations to be valid in any way.

[garote]

I agee with your last point about taxing the shit out of the absurdly wealthy. I also feel that this tax law should apply to corporations too, because corporations are people, after all.

One counterargument to this I see is that R&D costs for fancy new technology can be quite high, so mega-corporations are required to make progress. I don't think that's necessarily the case, and even if it were, there is more to economic success than speed: If it takes 50 years to develop a self-driving car from open-source parts and ten thousand garage-tinkerers, instead of 15 years for Google to do it by throwing 10 billion dollars at the problem, I'm OK with that. Google would protest otherwise of course, because they are in a race for patents as much as for products, but I don't think I'm alone in saying, "fuck them."

I'm also for the idea of taxing dividends and rent way higher than salary. (And I say that even though I am a landlord of my own duplex.) If we crank that percentage up high enough, corporations will just find a way to stop paying dividends, and I'm okay with that. Tax rent income high enough, and large-scale land barons will no longer be able survive if they're leveraged to the hilt paying interest on their mortgages - which most of them are. What does that do? It makes it less lucrative to be a bank. I'm fine with that.

It also helps to prevent the atrocious theft of money in the form of rent from all the workaholics in the Silicon Valley -- an issue close to my heart. Before San Francisco was completely reconstructed as a giant tech industry workshop, it was possible to rent a room for a couple hundred bucks and make a living as part-time clerk in a bookstore, and spend your free time being politically active, jumping around in punk shows, and camping it up in pride parades. Now that room will cost you two grand, all the bookstores are gone, the punk venues are wine bars, and pride has become a kid-friendly extension of Burning Man stuffed with corporate sponsors. But I digress.

Nevertheless, I cannot get behind your other tax ideas, about equipment versus human labor. There's something unsettlingly communistic to me about them.