Bernie Sanders Wants a “Robot Tax” For AI Job Losses

These days, the talk about Artificial Intelligence runs hot and cold. Wall Street anticipates a bonanza. Others see an apocalypse. It’s enough to make a manic-depressive consider a medication check.

Senator Bernie Sanders belongs to the panicked camp. His recent report’s title sums up his conclusions: “The Big Tech Oligarchs’ War Against Workers: AI and Automation Could Destroy Nearly 100 Million U.S Jobs in a Decade“ (Sure, quoting Sanders risks making the proverbial “straw man” argument. Yet Sanders does speak for much of the Democratic Party’s increasingly ascendant Progressive wing.)

According to Sanders, AI is on track to eliminate nearly 100 million American jobs. His answer to all this coming doom is something he calls a “robot tax.” “If workers are going to be replaced by robots,” he writes, “we’re going to need to adapt tax and regulatory policies to assure that the change does not simply become an excuse for race-to-the-bottom profiteering by multinational corporations.”

Translation: Punish technology before it hurts anyone. But history says otherwise. Every time technology changed how we work, it made us richer, not poorer.

His is a recurring impulse. One that has popped up every time human beings faced a leap forward. The first “automation crisis” wasn’t about robots. It was about tractors and other inventions that mechanized farming.

In colonial America, about 90% of the population worked in agriculture. By 1870, that share had fallen below half. Today, less than 2% of Americans are farmers.

A catastrophe? Not exactly. During that time, agricultural productivity exploded.
New inventions—mechanical reapers, threshing machines, and steel plows—made farming faster and less brutal. Engines pulled plows once dragged by animals. Tractors replaced the mule and the ox. And people left the farm for jobs that didn’t involve twelve-hour days behind a horse.

Would Bernie Sanders have proposed a “tractor tax” to pay for displaced farmhands? History doesn’t suggest that it would have gone well.

Consider China, too. As recently as the early 1990s, about 60% of Chinese workers farmed. Today, it’s about 25%. During that same period, China’s standard of living increased twentyfold. Machines took jobs. But they created better-paying ones.

This pattern has been humanity’s story since the Industrial Revolution. Technology doesn’t destroy work—it changes it. Fewer people do backbreaking labor. More people manage, design, repair, sell, and create.

Each great wave of innovation produces disruption. Then it creates wealth and a better life. But Sanders and others on the left rarely trust that process. Their reflex is always to slow it down, regulate it, and redistribute it. They see markets as something to be tamed rather than unleashed. And they confuse change with collapse.

The Senator’s report warns that AI and automation will create “incredible wealth for their owners” while leaving workers “out of their jobs.” His fix: “Enact a direct excise tax on these technologies to protect workers and ensure that the wealth created by these technologies is redistributed back to the workers impacted.”

In other words, penalize efficiency to preserve inefficiency. Actually, we’ve seen this movie before, too.

Two centuries ago, the Luddites smashed looms in the British Midlands. These were skilled weavers who saw machines replacing them with unskilled labor. They feared hunger. They fought progress—literally. Yet the textile industry didn’t collapse. It grew. Clothing became cheaper and more available.

And the jobs that followed were more numerous and, in time, more rewarding.

Sanders’ “robot tax” is the same idea in modern form. Tax the looms. Save the weavers.
Forget that progress is what creates the wealth that pays for everything else.

Marxists like Sanders, then and now, usually predict disaster from innovation. They have a gift for catastrophization. They view every leap forward as the beginning of the end.

Bernie’s “robot tax” fits neatly into this playbook. It’s anti-innovation dressed up as compassion. It assumes that wealth creation is a zero-sum game—that someone’s gain must mean someone else’s loss.

But history keeps proving them wrong.

Human progress doesn’t work that way. When the world shifted from farms to factories, we didn’t all starve. When we moved from factories to offices, we didn’t all go broke.

And if AI shifts us from routine tasks to creative or more human-interaction-oriented work, we won’t all be obsolete.

We’ll adapt. We always have.

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Mac Larimer

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