WHAT WE REALLY NEED: TAXES WE CAN AFFORD.
IMPLOSION OF THE ... UNAFFORDABLE WELFARE STATE IS UPON US. — ROBSON
Perhaps it is not surprising that the government of Canada, running out of people to tax, is considering squeezing robots. But while I treasure that scene where the Terminator growls “I’ll be taxed” it does make me wonder what the point of the whole welfare state is.
Apparently the federal Liberals gathered a bunch of deep thinkers last fall to discuss the potentially catastrophic impact of our impending demographic winter on public finances. About time too. As my brother has expressed it, the aging of the population is not so much a tsunami as a glacier, slow but inexorable.
It is also encouraging that these boffins thought about the impact on the taxpaying workforce of robots displacing unskilled labour. (And that the Post news story said jobs “most at risk are farm and construction workers, accountants, lab technicians and salespeople … The professions at lower risk were paramedics, doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and journalists.” Man, that’s the first good news we journalists have had since Al Gore invented the internet. Unless robots don’t threaten our jobs because they’ll be gone too soon for automation to matter. Sigh.)
The advice the gummint received was heavy on the disruptive effect of the “gig economy” including on income inequality, as we freelancers don’t have pensions, dental benefits or any of that stuff. (Please send money.) Evidently politicians still dream of everyone having the jobs for life you used to get on the auto assembly line and still do in government, with pensions nobody and nothing could afford. And one innovative solution put forward was to let people pay their taxes “in kind,” that is, with indentured servitude not money.
So there’s the good news. For the bad news, read all the above again.
First, the implosion of the creaky, outdated, centrally planned and unaffordable welfare state is upon us.
Second, public authorities are unable to give genuinely creative thought to the problem. The whole thing about taxing robots, sweeping the gig economy into the government sack and paying people to do nothing means they have learned nothing from 60 years of policy failure including how productive activity flees excessive state burdens.
Sure, the “gig economy” caters to some people’s desire for flexibility given new technology. But it’s also a response to the government’s tendency to make privatesector labour as expensive and unresponsive as government bureaucracy through taxes, EI premiums, forced unionization, etc. (Every time you order a burger on a touchscreen and not from a teen, thank minimum-wage laws and excessive regulation.)
One economist said the government should ponder why Canadian firms are unusually likely to outsource “telework” abroad. I just told you. And the hoary idea of giving workers “more bargaining power” is more of what made us sick. Force expensive unionization on every single part of the economy and see how fast employment increases … abroad.
Third, letting people “pay their tax bills through noncash payments like volunteering to do work for the federal government” shows bizarre desperation. It may be how the pyramids were built. But in addition to being eerily incompatible with freedom, it’s a classic case of digging in the wrong place. What we really need is a tax bill we can afford.
I won’t dwell on the usual blather the Liberals heard about lifelong learning from smug “creatives” who don’t see what AI will soon do to them too and whose last laugh is liable to be short and bitter. But fourth, there was a proposal to tax any technology that replaces a living breathing human, showing that government still believes it can plan the economy. How would you begin to measure how many jobs word processors, or steam engines, eliminated and how many they created? (Answer: with a GIGO computer model.)
One possible solution put forward for the welfare state imploding is a so-called “guaranteed annual income” replacing the chaotic bundle of existing programs and their various work disincentives with one giant hyperefficient program to discourage productive effort. I’m sorry Doug Ford cancelled Ontario’s pilot program not because I think it would work but because we need to find out just how badly it would fail so we can rethink welfare altogether. Which is one thing the government is not doing.
Frankly I think we have far more serious problems with technology than shrinking EI premiums, from killer bots to autonomous systems we don’t understand to hacking critical infrastructure. And with a culture where children are not valued and we grow old alone. But it’s classic that the government’s main concern, in this brave new world, is how to preserve a welfare state that never worked properly, even taxing robots as the people it was meant to help disappear.
The one option never considered, of course, was less government. It’s the stuff of science fiction and fantasy.
AGING OF THE POPULATION IS NOT SO MUCH A TSUNAMI AS A GLACIER.