Pasquale Tridico (The Left, Italian), MEP for the M5S and chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Tax Matters, announced to the press on Wednesday 16 October that he would like to see artificial intelligence (AI) taxed.
“IA is a source of income (...), that’s why it needs to be taxed”, he said. Mr Tridico aims to work on an own-initiative report from 2025, after the hearings of the European Commissioners. “We need to carry out investigations and research, and find a way of taxing the outputs generated”, he said.
“Compare to industry, textile, building, cleaning services, hundreds of workers for each field producing for not so much outcome, not big profit, at the same time, you have high tech companies which produce an extensive outcome, with proportionally few workers”, he explained. Mr Tridico believes that AI is a source of income that generates production in the same way as labour and capital, and should therefore be taxed.
“Our system is built to follow workers and firms as well, we build our public expenditures on the idea that there are workers to be taxed, in firms”, he added. He gave the example of the pension funding system, which relies on workers. The various reforms that Member States have adopted in recent years raise the question of the sustainability of this system, but measures to raise the retirement age do not solve the system’s structural problem. This is based on an increase in the number of workers, which has not been the case for some time now, given the demographic situation in Europe.
Asked whether taxing AI could jeopardise it, the MEP replied that no study had shown that taxing innovation would slow it down. Instead, these taxes could be used to fund research through public innovation policies, according to the work of Italian-English-American economist Mariana Mazzucato. “Most of the results of today’s innovation are the results of 20, 30 years ago investment of research and development made by public research”, he argued. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)