I mean, the whole point is to fund it by making the more well off pay more. Whether that be from rich businesses or customers, doesn't really matter.
What I was trying to say is that if you want to tax a business you need to find a way to do it such that it won't affect prices, because that would mean they are in effect not being taxed, the consumer just pays for it on top of that.
The biggest concern would be that with price increases growing exponentially across the supply chain, the effect of the VAT on low income households would be disproportionally higher. If you want the Freedom Dividend to be more than a vehicle to introduce VAT and alleviate the immediate effects of an introduction of a VAT the specifics are kind of important.
I knew you were going to say something like this. Unlike the past Revolutions, I believe this time is different. This isn't simply changing how people work traditional jobs, but outright reducing the need for people to work them altogether. Autonomous machines are only going get technologically better, cheaper and more efficient than humans, unless artificially slow downed or stopped. Even if I'm wrong with the time frame (as you pointed out, the growth of jobs isn't looking good right now), I don't envision a possibility that despite how technologically advance things get, there will always be enough labor or even non-labor jobs for everyone to live on. That is, beyond just busy work.
Outright reducing the need for people to work traditional jobs is exactly what the example of the tractor I have given did as well. No difference here.
New and better technology has displaced low skill manual labor jobs for centuries now.
With regards to job growth, most of the resources I find say that the total number of jobs are increasing. I was specifically speaking to a net loss in jobs incurred due to automation as automation will also create jobs.
However, I didn't read my sources properly, the 7% loss I came across in google searches was an expected loss until 2027, not the loss we had so far which I can't really find relevant information on right now.
Generally the studies regarding job loss due to automation vary wildly, Oxford predicted 47%, OECD suggest 9%, and this is all total job loss due to automation, not net loss.
The video you posted only mentions the higher end figures.
To me it feels like you're not accounting for new jobs created. Things like AR or VR, which are already used in production, have the capacity to lower the skill barrier for a lot of jobs because they can outright tell a worker what to do or allow a remote expert to assist a lower skilled worker if needed.
Again, AI, which is the technology expected to fuel all of this, is just finding the problems and isn't at the point yet where we know whether these problems will have practical solutions. The expectations of engineers are very likely to be overinflated. To expect these technologies to reach production level maturity at the scale that is suggest sounds ridiculous to me.
Look at the cloud technology hype a few years ago. Granted, it's a much simpler problem, however, everyone and their mother thought we'd just ship everything into the cloud and save a ton of money. As it turns out the economic viability of cloud services for small and medium businesses is fairly narrow.
We already have warehouses that are automated, with little human oversight/workers. In fact, he talked about how the trucks' AI isn't perfect due to weather conditions for example. That are going be people watching over them, they just wouldn't be in the trucks themselves nor would that need as many workers. Unfortunately, I don't remember which video he talk about this.
Even I can't envision a future, at least not anytime soon, when there's is literally zero human oversight, but you don't need the same amount of people to do that.
We disagree here.
e=mc² would tell you that something not being "perfect" and reducing oversight for a thing like a truck and to subject it to the reliability issue of a data connection WILL lead to the deaths of a lot of people in traffic if it's done within the next decade.
I mean, weather would be the least of my concerns when current systems veer off the lane if the paint isn't 100% due to wear, will not brake if a picture of a road is painted on the back of a truck or have trouble recognizing red traffic lights because every single car's rear lights are red.
Even the best autonomous vehicle technologies show that humans intervene at a much higher rate than humans would crash. Reliability needs to be improved MASSIVELY still and this will be the most time consuming step or as some software engineers say: "we're 99% done, just need to do the other 99%".
Going back to the e=mc² thing, expect this technology to be applied to trucks in a meaningful way that reduces labor at a much later point in time.
The info on this chart isn't helping the people that are already losing/lose their jobs due to
automation, or for that matter anyone in general, since UBI goes beyond that.
See, this is exactly the problem I have with the discussion.
Instead of actually looking at market research and what is happening you post a video filled with jobs that are nowhere close to being automated and very early development stage robots or pure research objects.
Of course there is stuff in there that is already in production and stuff that has been in production for a long time as well but basing your argument on an overexaggerated and misrepresented current state of things is just unnecessary.
Worst case scenario, Andrew Yang is right about automation, but at least people have a base to fall on. Base case scenario, Andrew Yang is wrong about automation, yet people are better off than what they would have been before.
Worst case scenario is that people will only marginally be better off with increased prices due to an introduction of VAT.
Yang expects UBI to cost roughly $3 trillion, he expects spending to be $1.8 trillion on top of the current welfare programs and he expects that the additional spending of people recieving UBI will recoup roughly $400 billion in tax revenue.
So taxation would be somewhere in the vicinity of 12%-20% of the amount spent on consumption. Of course it wouldn't all be VAT as some of the money spend will end up as income tax for example but you need to apply VAT to all of the consumption, not just the additional spending caused by UBI.
Like you, he also mentions roughly 50% of american jobs to be at risk of being lost soon and like I've mentioned he's counting the jobs that would be heavily automated through AI and states that "AI isn't coming, it's already here". Please look at the market research above, it's simply not.
Realistically he doesn't have a chance at the presidency in 2020 but I'm really glad he introduced himself at this point in time. I can easily see him being an ideal candidate in 2028,2032 or 2036, just not right now.