admin
Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla this week told the country we need to “rethink capitalism” as artificial intelligence reshapes the economy, even proposing that as many as 125 million Americans could be taken off the income tax rolls and that the government should instead squeeze revenue from capital. His idea: lift taxes on stocks, real estate and capital gains while exempting a large swath of taxpayers who lose work to automation. This is not idle musing from a backbencher — it was published and amplified across major outlets and social platforms.
Khosla has been blunt about the scope of AI disruption, warning that millions of white-collar and blue-collar jobs could be replaced and even floating timelines that hint at near-term, seismic change in labor markets. He has publicly suggested universal basic income in prior remarks and shared video examples of roles AI can already perform, from accountants to customer service. Whether you agree with his forecasts or not, his prescription to tax capital harder is a radical reimagining of how America funds its government.
Conservatives should be angry and alarmed, not soothed. Raising taxes on capital punishes the very investors who take risks, create firms and bankroll the innovations that lift wages and expand opportunity. Khosla himself profited by betting on breakthrough tech — including early investments in AI companies — so to turn around and endorse policies that would hamstring entrepreneurship and chase capital overseas is both tone-deaf and dangerous.
Beyond fairness, the mechanics of Khosla’s plan would concentrate economic power in bureaucrats and Washington technocrats who would decide what counts as taxable “capital” and which loopholes to close. History teaches that when policymakers aim to tax and reallocate wealth on a mass scale, the result is less investment, fewer startups, and stagnating paychecks for the very people the plan claims to help. The bold notion of exempting nearly 80 percent of current taxpayers — as Forbes pointed out — would upend the social compact without any guarantee of long-term prosperity.
We should also be skeptical of the timeline and the certainty behind doomsday job numbers. Tech prognosticators have been wrong before, and pessimist narratives can be self-fulfilling if they drive panicked policy, reckless regulation, or premature redistribution. Critics inside and outside tech have warned about overreach and bubbles in AI hype, and sensible conservatives will insist on measured, evidence-based policy rather than sweeping ideological experiments dreamed up in billionaire chat groups.
If AI truly threatens jobs at scale, the conservative answer is obvious: grow the pie instead of shrinking incentives. That means cutting barriers to entrepreneurship, expanding skills training, streamlining regulation that kills small businesses, and encouraging capital formation so Americans can invest in the next wave of jobs. Let markets breathe and let Americans keep more of what they earn — that is how families recover from disruption, not by asking the successful to bankroll a permanent class of dependency.
Patriots of every party should reject technocratic schemes that reward elites and disempower workers. No one who loves this country should accept a future where policy elites quietly reassign the tax burden and tell working Americans their solution is to be exempt but dependent. If we are to confront AI, let us do so by strengthening families, defending free enterprise, and demanding policies that honor work, not by surrendering to the next grand redistributionist thought experiment from Silicon Valley.
