...cryptocommie mayor of New York and for some reason a Dem candidate for president in 2020. Corrupt and incompetent, his qualifications for office seem to consist of being married to a black woman, with whom he honeymooned in Cuba. He has a preppy-looking son named Dante, whose Divine Comedy involved getting his back hair up when a police car drove past him slowly...’s "presidential campaign" never really got off the ground.
And now even de Blasio himself finally seems to know it, saying that he’ll have a good hard think about this whole White House thing if he doesn’t qualify for the Democratic debate in October. This after the mayor didn’t make the cut for this week’s debate.
But de Blasio’s still out there plugging away. He was in Puerto Rico the other day, looking to make the U.S. territory a front-burner issue in the campaign.
Needless to say, de Blasio didn’t have to elbow supporters and news crews out of the way during his visit. The circus has moved on without him.
Also part of this last-gasp de Blasio push is an op-ed he penned for Wired, talking about how he would tax companies that use robots in place of human workers.
The is de Blasio’s idea of a political Hail Mary, the thing that’s going to inject new life into his presidential campaign?
De Blasio wrote that he would create a federal agency to oversee automation. The agency would be called the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency. Or, FAWPA.
Really rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it? De Blasio better hope that people don’t confuse it with DARPA, the shadowy, cloak-and-dagger "military innovation agency."
So, new taxes on business. And a huge new bureaucracy. De Blasio sure is good at checking those progressive Democratic boxes.
Under a President de Blasio, companies would undergo a permitting process for any automation that displaces workers. Those workers would have to be given new jobs with equal pay or would have to receive severance packages in line with their tenure at the company.
The robot tax would require companies that eliminate workers through automation to pay five years of payroll taxes up front for each employee eliminated.
The revenue generated would go toward infrastructure projects and new job areas like green technology, giving displaced workers a place to land.
If there is much revenue, that is. Because what this de Blasio plan mainly does is create a huge disincentive for companies to automate. Or a big incentive for them to hide their robot assets. Because automation is supposed to save money, not cost yet more money. De Blasio’s plan actually stifles innovation. Companies could just move their robots overseas. Good luck tracking them.
And where would it end? Would we slap a tax on ATMs, which have eliminated bank teller jobs? Or fast-food kiosks, which have replaced human workers? What about those self-checkout machines at the supermarket? Maybe we’ll find a little surcharge tax for using them at the bottom of our grocery receipt.
