Chris Crawford
Nov 1 · 2 min read

“it’s not clear what you’ll be educating kids to *do* in a scenario where the robots have taken most traditional jobs.”

Traditional jobs? Like the farming jobs that occupied about 90% of the population right up until a few centuries ago? All those jobs have been lost, and we have billions more people needing jobs. We’re all going to die!!! 😀

We’re talking about progress here. We’re moving people out of stupid, mindless jobs like sitting inside a truck for hours on end, watching the landscape drift by. We’re pushing them up a productivity scale where they combine their efforts with machinery to leverage their talents to be more productive. In a perfect world, each and every person would have a job that challenges their mental capabilities to their limit. There’d still be dumber jobs for dumber people, but the average would move up. Wouldn’t you agree that most people are in jobs that don’t utilize their full skill set?

My guess is that the educational requirements for everybody will rise. A high school diploma is nowhere near adequate for a decent job in a modern economy. I can see the minimum moving up to a two-year college degree, then a four-year degree. That will take some time, but that’s the direction in which we’re moving.

“taxing ‘unearned’ income seems similar to a wealth tax in that the rich are fairly adept at exploiting tax code loopholes or squirrelling money offshore”

Yes, they are, but it’s more difficult to hide income than capital. So long as the money stays squirreled away in investments, you can hide it. But at some point, if you want to actually get any benefit from the money, you have to actually get a check — a check that shows up in the tax accounts. Indeed, much of the problem with the tax code comes from the myriad loopholes that the wealthy have gotten inserted into the code over the decades. It should be obvious that we should simply sweep all those away. Besides, a tax on unearned income is MUCH easier to administer than the current system we use.

“I think a VAT aimed at consumption, especially of luxury goods, seems like a more straightforward near-term solution”

Yes, the Europeans have done a number of tweaks to their VATs to reduce their regressivity, but that turns out to complicate matters. If a plastics factory pays VAT on its output, but some of that output goes into food packaging that is exempted from VAT, do we backtrace the proportion of plastic that went into the food packaging and retro-actively reimburse the plastics factory? Mess, mess, mess. Again, the Europeans have a variety of systems that, all in all, seem to work, so I’m not dismissing VATs as impractical. My claim is that an income tax on unearned income is more precisely focussed on the problem of the Gini Coefficient.

    Chris Crawford

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    Master of Science, Physics, 1975. Computer Game Designer. Interactive Storytelling. www.erasmatazz.com