For a student of economics and taxation you offer up an incredibly shallow analysis of the issue. Leaving the legal and implementation issues aside for a moment, your discussion on the effects of taxation provides a grossly simplified and self serving narrative to the detriment of your readers’ understanding.
“they raise the prices of their products to make up the difference”
I understand that this isn’t the place to get in to intricacies of taxation but failing to even mention the underlying mechanism beyond the superficial first order effects brings in to question both your credibility and your impartiality. Even the above effect isn’t discussed to a level found in most introductory economics textbooks.
If you had truly sought to do justice to the topic rather than attract views (as I suspect is the case from the title of the post) then you might have taken the time to explain some of underlying concepts which would determine the actual outcomes of such a proposed tax.
An acceptable analysis would have at least mentioned things like relative factor productivity, substitution effects, and elasticities of supply and demand, even if only as qualifiers. For example, as I’m sure you are aware a tax on machines would almost certainly shift production towards more labour intensive methods leading to an increase in worker wages (ceteris paribus). Purporting to know whether consumers will be net beneficiaries or not based only on poorly explained first order effects sets a very low bar for thinking about the issue. I’m not saying you had to conduct a full partial equilibrium analysis to support your view (or even that your conclusion is wrong), just that claiming to be knowledgeable on the subject and then offering almost no real insight does nobody any favours.
I also suspect you probably knew all of this but decided that a proper treatment of the issue would not be nearly as sexy - or as supportive of your claim to know better then Gates. I just feel that it’s a shame that someone who has taken the time to study these issues is contributing to lowering the level of public discourse.
