We believe everyone should have the opportunity to achieve the American dream, to pursue outsized success, or change their station in life. This necessarily requires the ability to become an asset owner—to share in the ownership of the nation's production capacity. The United States has an incredible and broadly accessible stock market that derives from a strong consumer market.
Property and asset ownership are at the heart of America as a capitalist institution. This must be sustained even in a post-labor world of abundance. It's not enough to provide subsistence transfer payments in the form of UBI—we need a competitive framework that provides broad-based opportunity to distinguish oneself in terms of recognition and accomplishment and pursuit. Humans realize satisfaction derived from struggle, adaptation, and achievement, and this is necessarily contemplated in the PursueBetter.org framework.
The future is uncertain and no one can predict to what degree employment will or will not exist. We don't ever expect jobs will go away entirely—there will always be career opportunities to pursue for a subset of the population. For the purposes of establishing a baseline to work from we assume only 50% of the population may be meaningfully employed going forward—that automation and AI will further the current trend of labor being a decreasing component of production.
As labor is eliminated, income is no longer a viable form of taxation. Tax receipts must primarily be derived from the means of production without taking over control of such production capacity. We have no interest in a socialist construct of control over such means of production—private ownership of assets is a primary directive.
Our lawmakers will ultimately determine the tax structure when it comes to taxing the means of production, however we might anticipate per unit economics such as a $1000 per month on any sufficiently autonomous technology. Take for example an autonomous taxi where the profitability of such an autonomous unit will far outpace such a tax level enabling asset owners and stakeholders to recognize the sheer profitability of running transit autonomously. If we consider that the overall demand for transit could expand as a result of low-cost scale, we could end up replacing the roughly 300 million registered vehicles in the US today. That number of units generating monthly tax receipts of $1000/unit would result in annual tax revenues of $3.6 trillion annually. Such per unit economics could be applied on any inference-based robotics—delineating standard CNC (computer numeric controlled) based robotics that follow pre-programmed paths on repeatable manufacturing processes, versus those that are intelligently acting with inference-based models. To the degree possible, the onus of tax generation should be mapped to the labor-displacing technology.
In the interim transition and adoption phase, we will see gradual acceleration of both automation and labor reduction in what should be fairly symmetrical growth in each. We should expect to begin moving traditional transfer payment mechanisms into the participation ecosystem, while growing the tax revenue available to such programs.
Transfer payments will be distributed relative to the degree and quality of participation, detailed in our calculated rate schedules.