From Marginal Revolution:
That idea was suggested recently by Bill Gates, though I think you can debate with what degree of literalness. It’s worth a ponder in any case, and here is a recent Noah Smith column on the idea, and here is Summers in the FT, WaPo link here. And here is Izabella Kaminska.
Put aside the revenue-raising issue (which will require some taxes on capital, most likely, including on robots): if we have taken in optimal revenue, is there a separate and additional argument for an additional robot tax? In this context, I would consider “robots” to be capital that is especially substitutable for human labor.
Presumably the claim is that there is either a distributional or an “externalities from a happy human being” reason to slow the rate at which capital is substituted for labor. But if we accept that assumption, should we tax robots or subsidize wage labor?
One reason not to tax the robots is that employers might substitute away from robots and toward natural resources rather than toward domestic human labor. Maybe that doesn’t sound intuitive, but think of paying the energy costs to outsource to another nation and transport the outputs back home.
But the main issue is probably one of incidence. A general problem with a wage subsidy is that sometimes much of its value its captured by employers....MORE
