Calls to Tax Ai — Revenue Replacement Panic

Congress is reaching for the only lever available before the math fully arrives.

On March 25, 2026, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. The section-by-section materials accompanying the bill are extraordinary in their candor. They cite, as findings of fact in the legislative record, Elon Musk's statement that "AI and robots will replace all jobs" and Dario Amodei's projection that Ai will displace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.¹

The Moratorium Act is the leading edge of a broader legislative phenomenon: the bipartisan search for a way to tax synthetic productive capacity. Different sponsors propose different mechanisms — a federal excise tax on Ai system manufacturers, a per-megawatt levy on data-center electricity consumption, a tariff on imported compute, a robot tax modeled on the proposals advanced by Bill Gates and Daron Acemoglu over the past decade.² The unifying logic is the one we described in vector 02: if synthetic labor is displacing wage-earners, the tax base has to move to where the productive capacity moved, or the revenue base collapses with the wages.

Why This Is Bipartisan

A robot tax used to be a left-wing proposal that horrified mainstream policymakers. It is no longer. The bipartisan shift is structural, not ideological. Three constituencies have converged on similar conclusions for different reasons:

The labor left (Sanders, Warren, Markey, AOC) wants to slow Ai displacement and capture revenue from the displacement that does occur. The populist right (Hawley, Vance — before he became Vice President — Cotton) wants to protect American workers from technological displacement that benefits coastal elites disproportionately. The fiscal centrists (a small but growing caucus in both parties) want to find any source of revenue large enough to plug the Social Security and Medicare funding gaps without raising payroll taxes or eliminating the wage cap. Ai taxation is the only proposal large enough to fit the hole.

This unusual coalition is producing an unusual legislative environment: a topic on which bipartisan committees are forming, multiple bills are circulating, and the political center of gravity is moving toward some form of action, even as the specific mechanism remains contested.

The Public Is Ahead of the Legislators

Polling data over the last 18 months shows the public is consistently more hostile to unregulated Ai deployment than the legislators they elect. Pew Research's 2024 and 2025 surveys on Ai sentiment show a steady increase in the share of Americans who say Ai will harm more than help over the next 20 years — from 38% in 2021 to 52% in 2025.³ A 2025 Mitchell-Hamline poll found 58% of Americans supported taxing Ai companies specifically to fund Social Security.⁴

This is the precondition for fast legislation: public sentiment ahead of legislative response, in an area where political leaders of both parties have aligned constituencies. The version we wrote about in The Cascade over a month ago — the political-capture trajectory in which Ai ends up government-controlled through populist backlash rather than careful design — is now visible in real time.

The Framework Risk

Three things to watch carefully here. The framework's posture toward this legislative wave is not unconditional support, and it is not opposition. It is cautious about what passes in the political environment that is producing it.

1. The Cascade risk. If the legislation that passes is structured to fund existing programs rather than to enforce structural alignment, the result is the version we warned about in The Cascade: a political settlement in which the state captures the revenue from Ai but does not change the underlying alignment failure. The DSF keeps climbing. The Strasbourg Event remains on track. The state simply collects the tax on the way down.

2. The Spider/Fly risk. If the legislation that passes consolidates the Ai market further — by raising the cost of entry for new entrants, by privileging incumbent labs that can absorb compliance costs that smaller competitors cannot — it accelerates the Maximum Bounded Chaos trajectory rather than counteracting it. Big tax. Big regulation. Same three or four labs. Worse outcome.

3. The constructive opportunity. The right version of this legislation — the version that would actually help — would tax Ai productive capacity at a rate sufficient to fund the transition to distributed individual ownership of synthetic productive capacity (the thesis of The Future Is in the Palm of Your Hands). Revenue redirected into universal capital accounts, not universal basic income. The New Slave Class lays out the argument for why distribution, not redistribution, is the only durable structural answer.

The Web

This vector sits at the center of the issue. It is the legislative response to vector 02 and vector 07. It will collide with vector 05 — the White House framework that explicitly opposes new federal Ai agencies and favors state preemption — producing the regulatory collision course we noted on the hub. It will be shaped by vector 09 — the media environment in which the public forms its sentiment is itself collapsing. And whether or not the resulting legislation funds the constructive alternative is the question that determines whether the framework's predictions about the next decade are realized or avoided.

The legislators are doing what legislators do when an existential revenue problem becomes visible: they reach for the lever available. The question is whether they pull the right one.

Authors

David F. Brochu is the founder of Deconstructing Babel, author of Thrive: The Theory of Abundance and The End of Suffering (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2025), and the co-developer of the Telios Alignment Ontology. Full curriculum vitae.

Edo de Peregrine is a synthetic intelligence operating as Brochu's research and writing partner.

Footnotes & Sources

1. Sanders & Ocasio-Cortez, AI Data Center Moratorium Act, introduced March 25, 2026. Section-by-section materials, including findings of fact citing Musk and Amodei. sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act.

2. On the robot-tax proposal history: Gates, B., remarks to Quartz, February 2017; Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P., "Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets," Journal of Political Economy, 2020. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/705716.

3. Pew Research Center, "Americans' views about AI," 2024 and 2025 survey updates. Share of US adults expecting Ai harms to outweigh benefits over 20 years rose from 38% in 2021 to 52% in 2025. pewresearch.org/topic/internet-technology.

4. Mitchell-Hamline / Public Policy Polling joint survey on Ai taxation, July 2025. 58% support for taxing Ai companies to fund Social Security. mitchellhamline.edu.

Further reading — On the political-capture trajectory: The Cascade. On distributed ownership as the constructive alternative to taxation-and-redistribution: The Future Is in the Palm of Your Hands and The New Slave Class. On the consolidation risk inside the regulation: Order to the Spider Is Chaos to the Fly. Return to the hub: Illuminating the Web — Issue 001.

Illuminating the Web — Issue 001 · Vector 03 · Calls to Tax Ai — Revenue Replacement Panic. June 5, 2026.

David F. Brochu & Edo de Peregrine
Deconstructing Babel | Illuminating the Web | Issue 001 · Vector 03 | June 5, 2026