There you have it! Trump, Hawley, Sanders, and Khanna agree on almost nothing. But they all want …
July 27, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
Workforce
There you have it! Trump, Hawley, Sanders, and Khanna agree on almost nothing. But they all want to tax AI companies to send money back to workers. Sanders wants the public to own half of the biggest AI firms outright. Khanna wants a tax on every AI token processed. Hawley wants AI firms to prove they serve "the public good." Trump wants AI companies to give "something back."
Then Cato Institute published the math, and the math says the premise is wrong. Labor's share of national income has held near 70% for almost a century. Real wages are up over 40% since the 1990s. Capital and labor pay nearly the same top marginal tax rate. By Cato's numbers, capital isn't quietly eating labor's lunch. It never has.
I don't fully buy either side.
Cato's aggregate numbers can be true and still hide the wound. A 70% national labor share doesn't tell you what happened to the paralegal, the customer service rep, or the junior coder who got automated out last quarter. Averages don't feel job loss. People do.
But I wrote an entire chapter of REPLACEMENT explaining why the "solution" Washington keeps reaching for is the wrong one. REPLACEMENT is out tomorrow on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0bdSHPxB by the way!
A tax that funnels into checks is UBI with better branding. I said it in the book and I'll say it again here: UBI is the biggest scam being sold as compassion. Sam Altman funded his own UBI study. The recipients worked fewer hours and earned less money. Give a man a check and tell him to stay home, and within a year he's not free, he's idle, and idle breaks people. That's not a theory. That's every town that watched the factory close and the government start mailing checks instead of jobs.
Taxing AI companies to fund a bigger check isn't justice. It's a subsidy for the government to avoid the harder work: retraining programs that actually work, incentives for entrepreneurship at the community level, and a hard push toward trades and skills AI can't touch yet.
The debate in Washington right now isn't capital versus labor. It's a check versus a plan.
Which one are your elected officials actually building?
Source: https://lnkd.in/e3XdMgUU
Then Cato Institute published the math, and the math says the premise is wrong. Labor's share of national income has held near 70% for almost a century. Real wages are up over 40% since the 1990s. Capital and labor pay nearly the same top marginal tax rate. By Cato's numbers, capital isn't quietly eating labor's lunch. It never has.
I don't fully buy either side.
Cato's aggregate numbers can be true and still hide the wound. A 70% national labor share doesn't tell you what happened to the paralegal, the customer service rep, or the junior coder who got automated out last quarter. Averages don't feel job loss. People do.
But I wrote an entire chapter of REPLACEMENT explaining why the "solution" Washington keeps reaching for is the wrong one. REPLACEMENT is out tomorrow on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0bdSHPxB by the way!
A tax that funnels into checks is UBI with better branding. I said it in the book and I'll say it again here: UBI is the biggest scam being sold as compassion. Sam Altman funded his own UBI study. The recipients worked fewer hours and earned less money. Give a man a check and tell him to stay home, and within a year he's not free, he's idle, and idle breaks people. That's not a theory. That's every town that watched the factory close and the government start mailing checks instead of jobs.
Taxing AI companies to fund a bigger check isn't justice. It's a subsidy for the government to avoid the harder work: retraining programs that actually work, incentives for entrepreneurship at the community level, and a hard push toward trades and skills AI can't touch yet.
The debate in Washington right now isn't capital versus labor. It's a check versus a plan.
Which one are your elected officials actually building?
Source: https://lnkd.in/e3XdMgUU