{"text":[[{"start":4.25,"text":"The White House proposal to put shares in big AI companies such as OpenAI into a kind of sovereign wealth fund for the general population gets two things right. First: AI will be a windfall for some, and devastating for others. Second: the gains from the technology’s boom show up as rising equity valuations, so if the goal is to minimise transition pain, that’s a good place to start."}],[{"start":27.65,"text":"But the idea of public ownership of AI companies, which in various forms has recently been put forward by President Donald Trump, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is not the way to go. Should participation be mandatory or optional? What even is an AI company? Would chipmaker Nvidia count, or data centre investor Blackstone, or a Wall Street bank that deploys AI and lays off workers? "}],[{"start":52.849999999999994,"text":"Rather than bending capitalism out of shape, a better way to smooth AI’s rise is with a tool that exists: tax. No, not an AI-specific profit tax. Those, such as the “robot taxes” championed over the years by folks including Sanders, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and some New York state senators, would be complex and invite all kinds of definitional fuzziness."}],[{"start":75.64999999999999,"text":"Instead, consider capital gains tax, which targets the very place the benefits of the AI boom have built up. In the US, as in most countries, investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than income for the wealthiest. If an AI investor in the US sells shares in their company and books a profit, they are taxed at roughly half the rate they would pay on the same amount received as a salary or bonus."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":101.29999999999998,"text":"That gap has existed for nearly 40 years. Ronald Reagan closed it in the 1980s, but not for long. Joe Biden proposed doing so during his presidency, and at least one Labour politician would like to do the same in the UK. Equalising the rates might be too bold a step — and would also anger the private equity industry, which benefits handsomely from the status quo — but there is room to bring them closer together."}],[{"start":125.34999999999998,"text":"Meanwhile, there’s another wrinkle begging to be ironed out. When wealth is passed on at the point of the owner’s death, the “basis” on which capital gains tax is calculated gets reset to the current price. Treating inheritance as a taxable event would create over $100bn of tax revenue over 10 years, Yale University’s Budget Lab calculates. "}],[{"start":146.74999999999997,"text":"As companies get bigger, the loophole gets more absurd. Founders of multiple-trillion-dollar empires such as SpaceX and Meta Platforms can one day pass their assets on to their heirs, who — if they sell right away — could pocket a colossal gain and pay not a penny in tax."}],[{"start":163.59999999999997,"text":"Reconsidering that arrangement won’t raise money now, but would bolster the US’s finances in the long term. The total budgetary gain from taxing investment profit at ordinary income rates and removing the inheritance loophole could be $1.8tn over 30 years, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania estimated in 2024."}],[{"start":185.14999999999998,"text":"In an ideal world, fiddling with tax this way wouldn’t be necessary — and nor would talk of the government taking stakes in companies directly. But the world of laissez-faire no longer exists. AI’s impact is real, and will be messy. Jobs will be incinerated; people will have to be reskilled. That takes time, and money. And the US, with an increasingly anxious workforce and federal debt exceeding 100 per cent of GDP, has neither."}],[{"start":219.24999999999997,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780984382_2881.mp3"}