Robo Taxes

Governments hand out huge subsidies for all kinds of robots. They may not know it, but they do. Wasn't it human labour they were supposed to be supporting?

Bill Gates points to the problem in an interview with Quartz: "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level."

Taxing robots could pay for a universal basic income, though it is not clear if this is really as good an idea as Leonid Bershidsky has recently argued. In any case, time has come for this idea to be considered. Stay tuned.