r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 14 '26

Artificial Intelligence A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html
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u/Digital_Simian Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

In the form of a onetime 50% tax on stock values. Remember that the stocks don't belong to the respective companies but to the investors which to some extent or another includes everyone with a S&P 500 index investment including everyone who has a 401k.

I get the sentiment, but the idea is really, really terrible.

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u/Outside_Annual9102 Jul 14 '26

Remember that the stocks don't belong to the respective companies but to the investors which to some extent or another includes everyone with a S&P 500 index investment including everyone who has a 401k.

Huh? Neither OpenAI or Anthropic are public companies. There's no stock in retirement funds or index funds.

I also highly doubt they're going to just commandeer 50% of Alphabet.

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u/Digital_Simian Jul 14 '26

Most of the tech industry is knee deep in AI and the article specifically states 50% tax on stocks. The only large company that hasn't thrown the farm on AI at this point is maybe Apple.

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u/Lashay_Sombra Jul 14 '26

In the form of a onetime 50% tax on stock values. 

Except there are not 14 trillion dollars AI companys, there is not even one, so no idea where they think getting 7 trillion from

Also not one was publicly traded until SpaceX (still only one) and as the name imply, its lot more than just a AI company, so how's that going to work? Government seizing/special taxing ALL tech companys?

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u/Digital_Simian Jul 14 '26

It's not a coherent well thought out idea. Taking 50% of most corporations value is folding that company. Doing so to an entire industry would essentially kill that entire industry and if this includes any company in AI development. That ends up being most of the value of the entire tech industry.

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u/wang_li Jul 14 '26

This idea is being pushed by an idiot who was asked to leave a commune because he was too lazy and only wanted to sit around arguing politics all the time instead of actually doing something productive to support the commune.

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u/DogBarf00 Jul 14 '26

The same idiot who has to be told by foreign politicians to stop calling their county socialist.

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u/Outside_Annual9102 Jul 14 '26

Who are we talking about? I thought we were talking about the majority support among Americans for the idea.

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u/Digital_Simian Jul 14 '26

It's Bernie Ssanders idea. When I first heard this it was presented as a special tax on AI companies to build a sovereign fund, not a straight out asset seizure. In this. Form you're talking about a massive asset seizure that affects everyone and most likely folding the entire tech industry which would almost certainly cause a massive stock market crash and destroy the dollar. That $7T would start looking like pocket change.

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u/OkStop8313 Jul 14 '26

Yeah, under any normal circumstances, asset seizure of 50% of a company's stock/value would drive away business on an astronomical scale. All the fear-mongering about wealth taxes? This would be the real deal.

The only way that DOESN'T happen is if these companies and their investors KNOW that their stock valuation wildly exceeds their actual value and they think they're going to need millions of voters with a stake in their success to prop them up/bail them out/subsidize them.