Not going to debate this one. The bit tax came up in a discussion of how to compensate those workers who are displaced by technology, who can't be retrained and who seem to have no future in the workforce.
arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Christoph Reuss Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2010 6:03 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: "productivity dividend" (was Re: private fire services) Arthur wrote: > I was originally going to call it a "productivity dividend" but the reality > is that it was a tax so that is what it was called: a bit tax. I think your basic idea is logical -- that when the productivity base develops from industrial age to information age, the tax base should be changed accordingly. But as I outlined in my questions, the devil is in the details, such as practical measurements, tax collection overhead, attribution to countries, tax evasion possibilities, etc. So the suggestion of a "Bit Tax" should not just be a vague basic idea, but complete with implementation details, in order to assess its feasibility. As a senior economist in the Canadian gov't, you also have the numbers and know-how to provide such implementation details. A different point of view is that taxing productivity (work) is a wrong approach, because it penalizes/discourages productivity and the Producers. "Modernizing" the tax base would not change that wrong practice -- worse, it would discourage the progress towards information age, and in it, it would hamper the free flow of information (e.g. if FW-L would cost users a tax, fewer users would use it). A better approach would be to derive public funding from the general wealth of the planet, such as oil, natural gas, metal ores incl. gold, and real estate! Instead, the current trend goes towards further privatization & profit maximization by & for a few super-rich at the expense of the vast majority. To the point of bleeding out the productive middle class while giving tax-breaks to billionaire Predators. My point is that we need to overcome the paradigm of "productivity dividend" and instead move on to a "commons dividend". This would also help to de-couple "work" from payment, opening new possibilities of Future Work. Chris _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
