An attempt at describing the difference between machines and workers:
But Nicola Solomon, chief executive of the Society of Authors, warned such measures could have harmful consequences for humans and urged the Government to level the playing field.
She said: “If you buy in large amounts of machinery or software you will get capital allowances for that. If you take on real people, you have to pay their tax, their National Insurance and so on.
“So it actually becomes cheaper to buy and use machinery than to buy and use people, even if the base costs were the same.”
Umm, no. Not no as in the sense of not really, there’s a subtlety being missed here. No as in just no, wrong.
Under the old system the entire and whole costs of hiring people were allowable against tax - that is, they were costs deducted from revenues before profit calculated - in the year of the paying of the workers. The buying of machinery costs were only so allowed over time. Thus the machinery was more expensive by whatever the time value of that money was as set against the tax allowed depreciation schedule.
The new system, full expensing, treats paying for machines exactly the same as paying for workers. It is not a new bias in favour of machines, it’s the removal of an old bias against them.
Presumably there are members of the Society of Authors who understand tax, economics, equally presumably they’re off writing books about tax and or economics. Leaving no one who does to run the Society. Pity but there we are.
Of course, it gets worse:
The creative industries have called for an overhaul of the UK’s tax regime for the artificial intelligence (AI) era amid concerns it will be cheaper to buy machines than hire humans.
Err, yes, applying more machinery to human labour is also known as “increasing productivity”. True, as Paul Krugman has said, productivity isn’t everything. But in the long run it’s pretty much everything. That is the aim and purpose of all economic advance is to destroy jobs - to make it cheaper to hire machines than humans.