Technology

I spent a little while thinking about this earlier in the year, I had the idea formed more cogently at time but I'll try and put it as best as I remember. Income tax can kind of be restated as a tax on a corporation as a function of the value an individual provides to the company.

This isn't perfect but, I'm a PAYE employee, so the income tax I pay is done so at source. I don't ever see that money. In real terms it makes little difference to me whether I pay zero income tax and the company reduces my salary but pays a fee to the government for the privilege of employing me. The tax rates don't change hugely over time and I'm not on the margins of a tax band, so this mostly holds true for me. My salary and the tax band that puts me in are a proxy for the value I provide to the company (under the assumption I make net positive money for the company).

I feel like an explicit change to codify this is required to allow for the proper taxation of companies undergoing a shift to automation, otherwise it's too easy to domicile profits/wealth elsewhere (as it stands). Even thinking about this now, for knowledge work, how do you tax a company in Germany when the processing is happening on a privacy compliant server in Somalia? Even more stringent data protection and localisation laws? Can your models cross borders? Does that lead to multi-tier AI based on the capabilities of underlying populations and availability of training data?

Generally I'm pro-humans not having to grind to live and I generally see AI/automation as a boon for this - alongside proper taxation and redistribution of wealth, but I'm not sure I've ever seen any good explanation of how the nitty gritty of this functions in the real world.