Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, with a net worth of roughly $86 billion, often hailed as a genius, had a rather less brilliant idea he proposed to fix the ailing U.S. economy: have robots pay income taxes.
Speaking with Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, Gates posited, “If a human worker does $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think we’d tax the robot at a similar level.” He added, “What the world wants is to take this opportunity to make all the goods and services we have today and free up labor – let us do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class side, helping kids with special needs . . . “All of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very unique, and we still deal with an immense shortage of people to help out there.”
The Microsoft co-founder opined, “You can’t just give up that income tax. Some of it can come on the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there. Some of it can come directly from some type of robot tax.”
This is the height of hypocrisy. The man who made more money off of selling higher levels of technology to the masses is suggesting we punish employers for using technology to aid their businesses and save money?
What Gates is suggesting is simply a tariff on robots.
How would Gates feel if we taxed him for every Microsoft product that made him such a wealthy man?