There’s been a great deal of hand-wringing lately over the fact that several developed nations have already seen massive declines in birth-rates and may soon face a population decline. A recent article in the NY Times pointed out that this phenomenon appears to be accelerating, “Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.” Although increasing immigration levels is a solution in the near term, as more of the world’s countries become economically developed, declining birth rates may become a global phenomenon.
The major concern over “global graying” come from maintenance of pension systems, and the fact that those systems won’t be sustainable once the number of younger workers falls below a certain threshold. There is a solution to this problem though. Advances in robotics technologies means that humans are no longer needed for many jobs. As automation increases, we’ll eventually reach a point where an entire factory may consist of nothing but an army of robots, and a handful of engineers who sit in a ‘crow’s nest’ above the factory floor, watching closed-circuit cameras and computer monitors, ready to implement recovery and repair procedures as needed.
The Japanese have spent decades working to develop robots that can assist the elderly, and a growing number of robotics companies in Japan are now claiming that their robots can assist with tasks such as remembering to take medications, and performing basic cleaning duties, which will help people to stay in their homes longer, before needing to resort to assisted living facilities.
New high precision food holding cabinets are making it possible to lengthen hold times in the quick service food industry. These new advanced cabinets have numerous settings options and can provide exact temperature and humidity conditions to maximize the shelf-life of a variety of food options, helping to reduce staffing needs in quick service restaurant settings.
These are just some of the ways that companies are now managing to replace workers with automation. There’s also a huge political shift afoot. As populations age, there’s less need for politicians to scrape and bow to any company that can move into town, set up shop and create a few more jobs. The problem of crime and political instability from an excess of unemployed young men is reduced dramatically, and companies have to pay competitive wages to access labor. This means that human workers benefit greatly from being in the workforce during a period when growing numbers of people are aging out of the workforce, and many are liquidating many of their assets and downsizing.
The one key step to making everything work, and ensuring Social Security and Medicare remain solvent, is the creation of a “Human Labor Replacement Value-Added Tax”. Instead of human labor paying income taxes, items that are deemed to be “human labor replacements” would have to be registered with the government and assigned an “HLR Tax Rate” that would be the projected equivalent of the social security tax paid for a human worker who did the job that robot was designed to do. Companies who were discovered using unregistered HLR devices would pay fines and penalties, just like companies that put an unregistered truck on the road are subject to. Legislators would have to agree where to draw the line on what degree of machine complexity is considered a taxable “Human labor replacement”, and would probably settle on a standard such as “any machine so complex that it requires at least 8 processor cores to function, and it independently performs tasks that traditionally would have been done by a human laborer, is subject to the HLR tax”.
It’s a simple solution, it makes Medicare and Social Security entirely sustainable, and the only barrier will be the millions of dollars in special interest spending from people who already have a fortune and want to invest in robotics so they can make themselves even more wealthy – the rest of the country be damned. If Democrats can get ahead of the eight ball, and propose an HLR tax as a way of helping to save jobs before the great propaganda shift related to the aging of the population occurs, then all American citizens alive today can still have Social Security and Medicare benefits when they retire.