NEW YORK / RankWire.AI / — Andrew Yang, who was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic primaries and is a co-founder of the Forward Party, renewed his call for implementing a national AI tax on Tuesday. He warned that current federal fiscal policies are skewing the labor market. During an appearance on CNBC, the CEO of Noble Mobile highlighted that heavy payroll taxes on employers discourage hiring of human workers. Yang pointed out that the tax system in effect provides subsidies to companies for automating their operations by exempting software deployment from comparable labor costs.
In the interview, Yang emphasized that under existing tax laws, companies face substantial payroll taxes and healthcare expenses when employing human staff. Meanwhile, corporations utilizing artificial intelligence technologies encounter no similar taxes, thus reducing their operational expenses compared to human labor. The Noble Mobile CEO stressed that the present legal setup implicitly promotes corporate strategies that accelerate replacing human workers with automation across key economic sectors.
Andrew Yang Warns: We Are Subsidizing a Technology That Will Displace Millions
Yang suggested a policy shift that would reallocate fiscal responsibilities from traditional payroll taxes to automated compute tokens and AI-generated revenue streams. Citing recent remarks from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who proposed a 3 percent revenue tax on generative AI deployments, Yang argued that taxing interactions with automated software presents a practical solution to market distortions. He also asserted that revenue from such an artificial intelligence tax should be redistributed directly to the public as universal cash dividends, rather than funneled into legacy retraining programs.
This policy debate takes place amid growing economic concerns about automation’s impact on employment in the United States. A recent joint survey by CNBC and Generation Lab found that 45 percent of young Americans aged 18 to 34 anticipate that artificial intelligence will harm their long-term career prospects. Additionally, macroeconomic forecasts by Bridgewater Associates executives estimate that automation could threaten approximately 18 percent of all domestic jobs in the next five years.
Rapid Industry Changes Displace Customer Service Workers
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that roughly 2.9 million employees work in customer service across the country, marking it as one of the first sectors experiencing swift automation-driven transformation. Yang warned that federally supported workforce retraining efforts have often fallen short in helping displaced workers find sustainable careers. He pointed to historical retraining programs for coal miners and warehouse workers as evidence that direct financial assistance tends to offer more stability than government-run job transition programs.
Yang concluded that reforming federal tax policies is essential to maintaining the competitiveness of human workers alongside advancing software agents. Since current tax structures subsidize a technology poised to replace millions of jobs, he stressed that neutral tax policy is crucial for managing the ongoing digital evolution of the nation’s labor market. Legislative experts are currently reviewing proposals to address the disruption caused by automation in upcoming congressional sessions.