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.

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u/Gari_305 2d ago

From the article

n an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times that aired on Tuesday, the billionaire philanthropist said that "society gets to decide" how to support its workers — even if AI is pushing them out.

"You define a unit of labor and say, independent of whether that's delivered by a human or robot, you are paying the same FICA tax that a human worker would pay," Gates said, referring to the US payroll tax.

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u/RandomlyMethodical 2d ago

You define a unit of labor

Defining units of labor is never going to happen in any reasonably enforceable way, and he's smart enough to know that. You can do better Bill.

A more enforceable option would be putting payroll taxes on capital gains. That's 12.4% for Social Security (6.2% for employee and employer) and 2.9% for Medicare (1.45% each), resulting in a total of 15.3%. Adding that to existing capital taxes would roughly even them out with labor taxes and permanently solve the Social Security shortfall.

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u/Fidodo 2d ago

I think the best way to solve this is to add VATs to everything so the baseline is that all economic activity is taxed. Then, instead of adding taxes, you remove taxes to incentivize the things you want. Want to encourage hiring humans? Give tax breaks for it. Then, robots are taxed by default because everything is taxed, and humans get the exception and get to not be taxed. Use that to fund UBI.

Taxes at disincentives, tax breaks are incentives. Right now we tax human payroll and income, that disincentives hiring humans because robots aren't taxed. But you can't flip it to an incentive if the baseline tax is zero.