A sitting member of Congress just published an op-ed calling for an AI tax to fund a jobs program

[Runner79]

Congressman Greg Casar, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, published an op-ed in The American Prospect arguing Congress should pass a new tax on AI specifically to slow job losses and fund a mass jobs program, and he is explicitly framing it against Depression era unemployment risk rather than as some abstract future concern

His core argument is about the current tax code's blind spot, businesses pay payroll taxes when they employ a human but face no equivalent cost when an AI system replaces that same worker, which Casar describes plainly as a de facto tax break for automating a job away, and he wants the AI tax structured around both token usage and the underlying compute power used to train and run these systems specifically so companies cannot just game the numbers by restructuring how they measure usage

He is drawing a direct line back to the Works Progress Administration from the New Deal era, arguing that retraining programs alone will not be enough if displacement genuinely happens at the scale some industry leaders are now predicting, in his own words only funding retraining at a moment of mass unemployment risks being like offering swimming lessons to passengers on a sinking ship, so his proposal pairs the tax revenue with direct job creation rather than retraining as the sole response

Casar is not alone in raising this right now either, Senator Elizabeth Warren published a similar warning about AI turbocharging wealth inequality around the same time, and Casar's own op ed leans on public projections from AI industry figures themselves, including Anthropic's CEO reportedly forecasting unemployment levels comparable to the Great Depression within five years and Bill Gates suggesting AI could make human labor unnecessary for most tasks within a decade

To be clear this is currently an op-ed laying out a policy position rather than an actual bill introduced in Congress, and it faces the obvious headwind of a Republican controlled government generally uninterested in new taxes on the tech industry, critics also argue the job loss predictions driving this urgency are overstated and that taxing automation risks slowing genuine innovation, so this is very much an opening position in a fight rather than anything close to becoming law

Tax AI to Create Jobs - The American Prospectprospect.org

[CaptainStatic56]

The payroll tax blind spot argument is the strongest part of this pitch, framing automation as an accidental tax break rather than just a productivity gain reframes the whole debate in a way that's hard to dismiss outright

[BretHart99]

Nice idea in an op-ed, dead on arrival as actual legislation though, there is zero chance this gets anywhere with the current makeup of Congress regardless of how compelling the underlying argument is

[AJStyles]

True for now but op-eds like this exist partly to plant a flag early so that when displacement does show up in the data, there's already a fully formed policy position sitting there ready to be picked up

[TheGame]

The swimming lessons on a sinking ship line is a good soundbite, credit where it's due for framing retraining alone as insufficient rather than just adding another training program nobody will actually use in time

[Emma92]

Citing Anthropic's own CEO's unemployment predictions as justification for taxing AI companies is a bit of an odd rhetorical move, using the industry's own doom talk as the evidence base for regulating the industry

[Cole75]

Not that odd honestly, if the people building the technology are the ones predicting Depression level unemployment then that's exactly the kind of testimony you'd want a policymaker to actually cite rather than ignore

[Frost Gary]

We need that here too.

[SchrodingersCat55]

Curious how you'd even calculate the tax fairly in practice, measuring token usage plus compute power sounds reasonable on paper but every company's actual infrastructure setup is different enough that enforcement seems like a clear nightmare