In a piece for Wired, the peripatetic New York mayor and Democratic presidential candidate warns that “automation in our economy is increasing far faster than most people realize, and its impact on working people in America and across the world, unless corralled, will be devastating.” His proposal calls for the creation of a new federal agency, the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency (FAWPA), which would oversee automation and create “a permitting process for any company seeking to increase automation that would displace workers.”
De Blasio also proposes to institute a “robot tax,” requiring large companies to pay five years of payroll taxes up front for each employee eliminated by automation. That money, he says, “would go right into a new generation of labor-intensive, high-employment infrastructure projects and new jobs in areas such as health care and green energy that would provide new employment. Displaced workers would be guaranteed new jobs created in these fields at comparable salaries.”
