@cjammet we see over and over that taxing particular sales to fund social programs causes trouble as those sales can’t provide a consistent and reliable revenue stream.
So no.
If a government program is needed, fund it through a general fund so it doesn’t rely on any particular funding stream.
@volkris @cjammet I agree. This idea is pandering to the idea that any and all AI sales are all bad therefore tax them more than they would be anyway, regardless of who the buyer is. Sales taxes affect the lower income purchasers more than the wealthy ones, proportionately.
Besides, any country or economy with a central bank doesn't need to do any such thing. You can fund UBI by creating the money first, get investment returns on it & by properly taxing the wealthy on actual income levels.
And the thing is, heck, if you really want to tax AI because it’s bad or whatever, fine, at least put the revenues in the general fund. It’s a bonus to help fund government.
I’m not really for that, but it’s less bad.
It’s the direct connection between this one unreliable funding source and this one important program that’s exponentially more problematic.
Governments do this stuff all the time, and it causes trouble.
One more point to consider: if government is funded by the bad thing, it causes a conflict of interests where government gets more money the more the bad thing is done.
@volkris @radiojammor Thanks for adding your thoughts!
In no way did i say AI is "bad."
It will, however, affect vast swaths of the labor market, and it behooves and the gov't to fully understand pitfalls that arise from technological progress. There is a human and societal cost to technological advancements at scale, esp w/ late-stage capitalist situations where income disparities are already v wide. especially true w/ tech will further benefit one side of that income disparity.
@volkris @radiojammor it's also pretty apparent to me that corporations are eager to eliminate any labor costs they can with AI solutions. that makes is a cultural justification/tipping point for figuring out how we fund #UBI.
I posted the survey to spark some discourse and gain understanding. working so far!
@cjammet so instead of taxing AI to pay for UBI because of a perception of a connection between the two, I would use the employment threat of AI as an argument to sell UBI to the public to be paid for like any other important government program out of normal government revenues.
Depending on just where we’re talking about, often the problem is that the public is not sold on UBI in the first place. It’s not about finding funding for it, but about convincing the public that it is worth funding in the first place.
We know where the funding can come from. It’s just that the public doesn’t agree to do it.
@volkris @cjammet Not quite, IMO. The public doesn't understand MMT and that you can create money, because politician's conflate household bills with national budgets, making the argument, "How can you afford it?" when they know damn well how.
Improve public awareness on both effectiveness of UBI, as well how it can be paid for, expose that monetary argument for what it is (& the politicos that peddle it), and how you can tax back the the value of a UBI from the wealthy that don't need it.
@radiojammor in my experience a lot of people reject UBI for reasons beyond the fiscal side of it, lots of ideas about it being immoral or impractical or corrupting in its own right, regardless of how the money may be raised.
But either way it gets to the same conclusion, regardless of why they don’t support it, there just is not broad buy-in throughout the population.
So if you want to move toward UBI, to focus on ways of taxing to pay for it is putting the cart before the horse. Until the public is convinced that it’s a good idea in the first place, it doesn’t matter how you want to pay for it, the public doesn’t really want to do it anyway.
@volkris @radiojammor ubi pilots have largely been successful and well regarded from what I've seen. I would also posit that many more people see the current state of wage/wealth disparity as a moral injustice.
@cjammet I suspect we are seeing different people 🙂
I absolutely know that some groups are absolutely thrilled with UBI and the results and everything else. But I also hear from groups who think the opposite.
There’s also the issue that even among people who see the current stage of disparity as moral injustice (which already carves out a lot of the population) there are going to be disagreements about whether UBI makes that better or worse, and then if you carve out the ones that think it makes it better, then you have the ones who think it’s worth it versus the ones who think it’s not worth it.
So you see it’s step after step of dividing the population, until at the end you don’t really end up with a consensus.
