Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is not a fan of the “robot tax” recently proposed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
“A robot tax is a particularly stupid tax. It is a tax on productivity — a tax on growth,” Grover told the Washington Examiner in an email exchange.
Gates made the suggestion during an interview with Quartz in February, in response to the number of jobs being lost to automation. “If a human worker does $50,000 of work in a factory, that income is taxed,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
But Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, criticized the idea as a “tax on the future.”
He isn’t the first to mock Gates’ idea. For example, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers asked in a Washington Post opinion piece, “Why pick on robots?”
Adjusting to automation is becoming an increasingly important tax issue, in both the U.S. and abroad. Debate on the matter just wrapped up in the European Union. In February, the European Parliament rejected the idea of a robot tax on firms that own them to support or retrain workers who lost out on employment due to robots.
When asked about how this might work in the U.S., Norquist quipped: “Why not tax consumers who refuse to buy high platform shoes, or hot pants, or non-black dresses or last year’s fashion?”
“Consumers ultimately decide what gets bought and they are therefore responsible for all unemployment. Tax those guys with long hair who put barbers out of work. Or book readers who bankrupt Disney films,” he said. “This is a rabbit hole too stupid down which to run.”
Several studies in recent years show jobs at risk of being lost to robots as a real challenge for the labor market moving forward. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers last month said up to 38 percent of jobs in the U.S. are “susceptible” to automation and artificial intelligence by the early 2030s.
When it comes to policy in the U.S., one top official in the Trump administration had little worry about the threat of robots’ stealing jobs from Americans. When asked about it, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said, “It’s not even on our radar screen,” and said it could be a problem in 50 to 100 years. “I’m not worried at all. In fact I’m optimistic.”
Norquist seemed to agree with Mnuchin’s positive outlook, and noted technology’s impact on jobs in U.S. agriculture over the past couple centuries.
“We used to have 90 percent of American employment on the farm. Then 70 percent, 50 percent, 30 percent and now 1-2 percent. What happened to the idea of 90 percent unemployment as farming became more productive?” he said.
Norquist is optimistic about further improvements in the productiveness of manufacturing. “We produce more manufacturing goods today with fewer workers … One hopes that we continue to have improvements in productivity, and that in fact continues,” he said.
As for the landscape of the job market in the future, Norquist said he doesn’t have the answer, but did warn against overbearing laws and taxes standing in the way of progress.
“I didn’t see Uber or Lyft or Airbnb or vaping,” the last of which Norquist is a leading proponent. “Certainly the politicians who write our regulations and laws didn’t either. They write laws that interfere with change. Laws and taxes take a long time to change.”
“They are the last things you want standing between us and a productive future,” Norquist said.
