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points by delichon 1 day ago | 0 comments

Alaska gets a huge portion of its revenue from taxes on extracting oil and gas. This is a model that any state could apply to data centers extracting compute from local resources. And if demand for compute is actually heading up the Kardashev scale, it could eventually fund the whole state and subsidize resident incomes. It would act as a hedge against possible disruptions by AI.

[–] estearum 1 day ago

Land Value Tax does this with effectively zero enforcement complexity and across all forms of communal wealth creation (which ultimately gets baked into land values).

[–] barumrho 1 day ago

Could you explain this? I thought the idea of Land Value Tax was that the value of land gets taxed regardless of how much value is generated by use of that land. (e.g. a vacant lot is taxed the same as a lot with rental properties built on top given everything else equal.)

[–] bryanlarsen 1 day ago

Data centers use small amounts of cheap land.

[–] s1artibartfast 1 day ago

No it doesn't. Land tax doesn't target data centers, which usually want cheap land.

Further, when land taxes are passed down, they focus of physical goods and ignores IP and contract value. This means they are more flatly distributed throughout the population.

Third, many high return activities require almost no land. A stock trader or bank might make millions with the nanowatt of natural resources needed to flip a bit in a database. A plumber might need a lot of natural resources to fix your toilet

[–] HDThoreaun 1 day ago

End of the day big tech would find a friendly government to work with before paying massive data center taxes. The fossil fuel extraction taxes work because the fossil fuels are literally in the state. If you want them you gotta work with the states government. Data centers dont have nearly the same physical restrictions

[–] labcomputer 1 day ago

The other reason fossil fuel extraction taxes work so well is because you're effectively taxing the residents of other states. The people who bear the impact of the taxes don't get to vote on the taxes.

[–] smallmancontrov 1 day ago

"Datacenters" is needlessly narrow -- as capital eats the world, we need to tax capital. Simple as.

We already tax houses, and by comparison stocks are more liquid than a firehose and easier to value than a $2 bill. There is no excuse.

As I have grown my small business, I have come to an appreciation for how comically lopsided the tax code is to push all of the taxes out of the invest/return economy and into the work/consume economy. It's really quite something. Anything to avoid the right side of the Kuznets Curve!