The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income.
Tax wise do you replace the replaced workers with zero tax robots or do you tax robot workers?
When a company do not pay tax or pay lower tax they do not pay for schools and roads. That is not cool. We still need roads and schools to build a future society.
Ie the bigger question is that of income distribution. Do you give all the money gained from the robots to the very few percentage who owns the store? What if a majority of worlds work are automated by robots.
How do you tax for the global warming that the store new low cost labor produces?
In other words as products starts to almost cost zero to consume but we are having global warming. How do we price so that we do not over consume cheap meaningless stuff?
> Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income.
Robots should pay tax in exactly the same way that the wheel, internal combustion engine, fire, chemical fertilizer, electric motor or stone axe paid tax.
You're trying to do macroeconomics (calculate tax revenue) with a microeconomic analysis (looking at one task/job in isolation). What happens in practice is that the people displaced by productivity gains (shoemakers, maybe) eventually find work in the broader economy doing jobs (like programming computers) that were previously infeasible due to labor costs but now have access to cheaper labor.
Obviously there are social aspects about distribution and justice inherent to rapid change like this. But they have nothing to do with tax revenue.
> The Question is if Robots should pay income tax? Robots replaced humans that paid tax. The society still needs income.
That's not a sensible question. Every tool or piece of hardware is an efficiency multiplier for the human benefiting from it. You wouldn't charge income tax to a carpenter's table saw, even though they're suddenly not having to use a handsaw that takes 10 times as long. There's no rational way to implement an income tax on efficiency boosting tools.
From an initial speculation on the subject, I don't believe we should tax robot workers, on the basis that it would be too difficult to logically create legislation for, especially considering the tech-knowledge of our legislators.
How would we measure? If it's per-robot, businesses would just figure a way of linking the computers together and calling them 'one'. If it's per-output, then what is a 'robot' vs computer/software, that exists in virtually every business already? Would it be fair giving small businesses another tax, for investing in computers and technology instead of human manpower?
The money saved gets taxed twice: as corporate income and then when distributed to shareholders again as individual income. It likely gets taxed at a higher rate, actually, because the income tax rate of the workers this replaces is probably very low but the rate of the company + the individual could easily be 60%.
If the money is passed back in dividends instead of share buybacks, it's taxed as income. The people who are receiving this income are probably quite wealthy. Let's lowball it and say that they were making $200,000 per year before receiving the dividends. I live in Louisiana, so I'll use a Louisiana income tax calculator [0]. At $200,000 per year, the marginal tax rate is 39.4%. The whole income is not taxed at this level, but any income you earn past $200,000 (e.g. dividends) is.
Uniqlo is a Japanese retailer, so they would be paying Japanese corporate tax rates. I can't pretend to be an expert in Japanese corporate tax, so my estimate of their marginal tax rate is just going to be their profit divided by their tax paid for the latest financial year I can find. We can find these data from their 2017 financial statements [1]. In 2017 they paid $584,025,000 in income taxes out of a total of $1,751,484,000 income before taxes. This gives us almost exactly a 1/3 marginal rate (33.345%).
Combining the personal and corporate tax rates gives us 1 - (2/3 * (1-.394)) = 59.6% tax rate. I may have underestimated the easily part, but in most states income tax would be slightly higher than in Louisiana, which would push us over the 60% threshold.
For comparison, an average worker in a warehouse might be making $30,000 per year. At that income, the total tax burden is $5,578 = 18.59%.
That's a very close eyeball to 60% actually! I was more surprised that it would be taxed as normal income not at the lower capital gains tax (in your example 15% instead of 39.4%), you seem more knowledgable though.
It turns out that you are right most of the time on the dividends and as it turns out I was wrong. The distinction seems to be that if you hold the stock for a long time, then dividends count as capital gains. If you hold it for a short time, it's taxed as income [0].
Tax wise do you replace the replaced workers with zero tax robots or do you tax robot workers?
When a company do not pay tax or pay lower tax they do not pay for schools and roads. That is not cool. We still need roads and schools to build a future society.
Ie the bigger question is that of income distribution. Do you give all the money gained from the robots to the very few percentage who owns the store? What if a majority of worlds work are automated by robots.
How do you tax for the global warming that the store new low cost labor produces? In other words as products starts to almost cost zero to consume but we are having global warming. How do we price so that we do not over consume cheap meaningless stuff?