Humans vs. Robots: Rethinking Tax Policy for a More Sustainable Future

Kathryn Kisska-Schulze & Karie Davis-Nozemack

This Article will analyze the intersection of U.S. industrialization with employment and innovation tax policies. It will investigate how seemingly disconnected tax policies collectively imperil the U.S. social safety net system and chart a course towards harmonizing them. Part I will show how industrialization and innovation have historically shaped the U.S. workforce and will use this foundation to predict how automation substitution will impact the workforce in the near term. It will use economic research to validate concerns about automation substitution and its negative impact on employment. Part II will analyze the social benefit goals underpinning U.S. employment tax policy and will identify the detrimental effects of automation substitution on social safety net funding. Part III will examine how innovation policy has supported the third and fourth industrial revolutions but, in so doing, has strayed from the original twin goals of economic development and social benefit. This Part will also show how economic progress has eclipsed the importance of social benefits in this policy. Finally, Part IV will determine that existing tax literature has not required employment tax and innovation policies to remain faithful to their original social goals. Consequently, this Article will make the case for a new approach to tax policy analysis, one that asks fundamental, normative questions. It will explain how sustainability provides an approach for balancing economic and social goals and addressing intergenerational equity. It also will show that sustainability will not supplant other approaches to tax policy but is sufficiently interdisciplinary and robust to incorporate their lessons.