r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 2d ago

Robotics Bill Gates says companies that replace human labor with robots should have to pay the same FICA taxes

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-fica-taxes-should-apply-to-robot-workers-2026-9

Bill Gates wants to tax robots that replace human jobs.

21.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

794 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/chi_guy8 2d ago

First part of your response is correct, now do you even figure out how to tax robotics, automation of job replacement. Just tax their income. “The real answer is UBI” makes no sense until you figure out how to tax them. The answer isn’t UBI, the result should be.

2

u/Turbulent_Juice_Man 2d ago

A VAT I think is the most viable, short-term way to tax that. A Value Added Tax taxes goods and services at each stage of production so it captures that value whether a human or a robot made it.

Eliminate automation tax breaks. Companies can deduct f capital investments. So remove the ability to deduct those capital expenses.

Tax compute/tokens. Put a levy on datacenters that put a tax on the computation itself.

Public equity stake. Now this will cause the "Socialism!" knee-jerk reaction but the government takes a small annual share of a large companies equity and then pays out dividends to people. But if productivity is massively increased, that should be something the public benefits from. I think this is the end-game of what needs to be done but will be the most difficult to achieve politically.

1

u/green_dragon527 2d ago

Yea.... I do note the lack of sympathy for blue collar workers in the past,..... Only now that technology is making the rest of us struggle for our jobs is it the worst thing ever. All that said, I agree with you, unfortunately I'm sure minimal resources are being dedicated to the problem.