I Got An AI Agent To Build A UBI Calculator: See Your Potential Earnings From Taxing Big Tech & Corporate Giants
Go wild imagining what you could earn if we taxed the biggest corporations for a Universal Basic Income or AI/Data/Tech Dividend
What if every citizen got a payout of thousands each year no-strings attached? That’s what could happen if we imposed a small percentage of tax on the revenues and market valuations of big tech and corporate giants.
I built a calculator with AI to show you how it could work. You can play around with it yourself.
But first, some background….
When I wrote my first Substack about Pete Buttigieg’s suggestion for AI Dividends, I thought it would be interesting to run the numbers. I wanted to see whether it was at least theoretically possible to extract enough new taxes from the biggest corporations to pay taxpayers a useful amount of money.
I built a very basic model on Excel, inputting data I found online. It took me a few hours but once I designed it, it was quite fun to see what it could look like if the biggest American companies were taxed 2% on their revenues or 3%. It was also interesting to see what it would look like if we were to tax companies based on their valuations.
I came to this rough conclusion:
A small tax on the revenue and valuation of the world’s biggest companies could generate upwards of $1.4 trillion annually. Divide that by all American taxpayers and they each get a check of around $5,000. Limit it to just the lowest 100 million earners, and the dividend soars to $15,000.
To reach a dividend fund of $1.4 trillion, I assumed a tax of 3% on revenue and 1% of market value (which can be calculated using a three-year rolling average) on the top 500 US companies and the top 200 non-US companies who have millions of American users/customers.
I then thought it would be useful to build an interactive calculator so that other people could experiment with other variations of this thought. What would it mean if we taxed companies 5% or 10% even?
Since I have no coding skills, I tried to use online calculator creation software but I soon realised that my tech skills were too basic even for this. So I gave up.
Yesterday, a friend told me about Replit.com which I had not heard of before. This is a website that allows you to communicate with an AI Agent the way you can communicate with a Large Language Model. The difference is that the AI Agent can actually do the work, from start to finish.
So I tinkered with it a little bit and within about 15-20 minutes, I managed to create an deploy a pretty impressive tax/UBI calculator with just a few prompts.
I think the calculator is really fun, easy-to-use and useful to the discussions on Universal Basic Income, corporate taxation and AI/Tech/Data dividends.
But I think the fact that I - someone with zero coding skills - was able to deploy this calculator so quickly is a real testament to how fast the world is changing in terms of our productivity and skills requirements.
The calculator - which takes the latest available data online - is not perfect. Nor does it perfectly align with my original proposal. In fact, with a 3% tax on revenue and 1% tax on valuation, the calculator estimates a $3,778 annual payout for all US taxpayers and a $12,653 payout if it is limited to the lowest earning 100 million citizens.
I will probably keep refining this with any feedback I receive, but in the meantime, feel free to explore it and send me your most interesting calculations.
Whether you agree with taxing big corporations or not, one thing is clear: we now have tools that let regular people explore these ideas, test them, and participate in the conversation.
This calculator is a small glimpse into a world where AI helps us rethink systems, starting with who pays, and who benefits.
Click this image to go straight to the calculator:
If you want to hear more about Replit and AI Agents (I really suggest you do), you should check out this episode of the Diary of a CEO:
The world is changing at such a fast rate. Watch this space to keep up to date.