This is an Off-Topic post, meaning it is not on the topic of Berkshire Hathaway. Except insofar as BH has recently invested tens of billions of dollars in funding our impending AI overlords through funding of Google's AI Cap Ex.

In this AI future it seems extremely likely that
1) We will have a great leap in productivity, leading perhaps to an age where human work should be optional since virtually everything material a human can want will be made by machines, with human made stuff of lower quality and much higher cost
2) If the AI "means of production" are owned by only the tens or so companies who are pouring Trillion$ into developing it, we will have no simple way of sharing the wealth
3) The United States Government will continue to dig a hole for itself filled with debt, not because our society is too poor to fund it (after all it does fund it with loans now) but because "the system" has broken down like one of those science fiction robots that gets asked an illogical question and simply loses the ability to think.

These things are all related. We are wandering into a world which may well make the industrial revolution look like a marketing gimmick, while our civic morality is still dominated by the thought that it is immoral to give people stuff they have not worked for, and while engaging an electorate that thinks that golden eggs grow on trees.

Meanwhile, we also have a bunch of people who want to put in place a wealth tax, essentially requiring individuals in the United States who have amassed more than a few hundred billion dollars in deferred taxes to pay up some or all of that rather than kicking the can down the road until Berkshire pays a dividend, or even possibly later than that. Why not let that wealth tax be paid with shares of stock?

So here is the brain fart:
1) Let companies pay their corporate taxes with shares in the company.
2) Gather all those shares into a big-arsed Sovereign Wealth fund.
3) Use the sovereign wealth fund to progressively take over from income taxes.

For 1) we have a law that requires payment of at least some part of the taxes in shares of the company until the Fed has amassed perhaps 20% or 40% of the stock in each company.

Hey! I just thought of this: maybe make it legal for ALL OF US to pay our income taxes by sending appreciated stock to the US Gov't and we get a discount on any cap gains tax we owe when we pay our taxes with stock. This would increase the rate at which the Sovereign wealth fund accumulated appreciated stock and lets face it, the stock that appreciates is really the best kind of stock to have.

We could easily have a rule that the Gov't can never accumulate more than 40% of any company, people could still pay their taxes using the stock but the US would have to sell those shares more or less as they were received once they had reached 40%. I guess I'd go even further and say that the Gov't would be disallowed from voting the shares in its sovereign wealth fund.

Now why? Why would my brain fart out such an idea?

Two reasons:

1) "We" (meaning the voters of the US) are no longer capable of voting to pay taxes that will support the spending we are willing to vote for. But If the government amassed a sovereign wealth fund earning something like 7% CAGR, and accumulated enough, we could just simply sell 4% or 5% a year and live off that. Just think of it like you think of retirement. Considering what we are willing to sell in order to avoid taxes, selling stock would have to be an improvement.

2) We (meaning all of us in the world) are embarking on what may well be the most remarkable changes in how humanity lived together that we have yet seen. If AI/Robots does mean that the machines do all the work and, if only the paperwork were not too much, we could easily just distribute stuff to everybody sort of the way the US does with drinking water and relatively clean air already: this solves the paperwork problem. No one is going to accept having a Quintilionnairre's tax on the people who own AI just so we can give welfare to the 99.99% of humanity that doesn't own a share. But if the government has shares of the FANGs or SpaceXAIrUs or misAnthropic or whatever, then we just use the income to buy stuff from the AI companies that own and produce everything, who will then get that money back, declare it as earnings, and use it to fund the shares that get paid into the US SOvereign Wealth IRS, in a virtuous Financial Circle that makes fiat money look like a bible verse!

Amodei/Altman 2028!

Humbly,
R:)