Another silly idea from Andrew Yang. He says that Demon Amodei, head of Anthropic, wants his demonic company to pay more taxes. Demon Amodei suggests a 3% surcharge on revenue. Yang says this tax could be used to fund his biggest silly idea, Universal Basic Income.
A better silly idea is a tariff on products using AI. This would shape the behavior of publishers, movie makers and social media, and wouldn’t simply circulate the same dollars.
Sane countries, including China, Korea and Japan, have strict local content tariffs. In the sane era before 1980, our auto and electronics companies worked with local content laws. Their branches in Canada and elsewhere paid local labor and local suppliers, and often used local designers and engineers to create local variations. Those local products were sold locally, NOT SENT TO AMERICA. Each country bought what it made, and our companies profited from the arrangement through sale of parts or royalties on licensing.
We have ALWAYS imposed tariffs on certain raw materials, despite the idiotic shared lie that Trump was the first in history to think of tariffs. Our original obsolete “constitution” wanted tariffs to be the main source of federal revenue.
The HUMAN CONTENT LAW would be a tariff on offhuman IP materials instead of offshore crops and minerals.
Of course all tax proposals are silly ideas. Congress will never raise taxes, never require billionaires to pay a penny for anything. Demon Amodei knows this. He’s playing a classic political game. He’s proposing a nice-sounding change while guaranteeing that it will never happen. The various parts of government play this game all the time. One house of Congress passes a fake “law” knowing that the other house will delete it. Presidents propose new “laws” knowing that Congress or the Supremes will delete them. The proposer gets undeserved credit for “doing something”, and gains talking points against the parts who “unfairly blocked” his cynical fake proposal.
Polistra's Mill 