Well we can. Someone owns the robots (or owns shares in the corporation that owns the robots). Just change the tax code to make Social Security tax apply to all income, including capital gains, with no upper limit.

The reason why capital income is not subject to social isurance taxes is because it is fundamentally an insurance scheme. People who earn mostly wages need social insurance in retirement (when they would not be physically able to work), so they (have to) pay it, while people who earn mostly capital income do not need it (as capital income does not depend on personal health / fitness to work).

Therefore extending social insurance taxes to capital income without extending pension payments to capital earners would be unfair. Local politicians tried something similar - remove caps on social insurance, while keeping pensions capped / strongly sublinear, and it was struck down by constitutional court.

Perhaps reasonable solution would be to split pensions to tax-based UBI, and smaller contribution based 'linear' pensions.

> now if we could just get the robots to pay social security

It's called “taxing capital” and we can (logically; whether we have the political will is a different question.)

Political will quickly arises if there is loud public demand for it.

That is not true in the US. What happens in the senate has low overlap with what the public wants compared with what donors/lobbyists want.

US economic policy has an almost null correlation with public demand (and interest, really.)

It’s almost as if we should redistribute profits from the robots universally to provide some level of basic income.

It's already happening though - commodity/consumable prices are far lower in real terms today compared to the previous decades.

Firstly that has nothing to do with redistribution.

Secondly total cost of living in a major city has gone up, not down, due to rent and realestate. Sure, i can but more polypropyl, bread and stainless steel, but what good is that if i have nowhere to live.

You jest, but the economic effects of all of this are severe. A total regression in the real-estate market (because stagnant demographics means the existing housing stock will roughly suffice or even exceed demand) will have severe effects.

Basically the end to growing demand, and thus essentially an end to growth-orientated capitalism.

My long term prediction is that once the boomers start dying off in droves, we'll face a real estate crisis as their houses flood the market...and many less desirable neighborhoods throughout suburbia will turn into mini ghost towns.

I come from northern Italy and during my relatively brief lifetime (length(life.qubex)>40) I’ve seen this happen to formerly exclusive “Beverly Hills”-type affluent residential areas (and un/gated communities). Enormous, cavernous hangar-sized homes that used to be worth millions of euros now struggling to sell for a couple hundred thousand.

You're describing Japan, now. Large numbers of abandoned houses, towns in rural areas emptying out, and the process is accelerating. An interesting article: https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering...

I only half jest, but this demographic situation is one of the reasons I support liberal immigration policies.

That fails when every country has falling birth rates

Swedish authorities did a study about this for that very reason. The conclusion was that it's unlikely that people will want to move halfway across the World only go get a job changing old peoples' diapers.

Alas, the PDF seems to have been taken off-line.