That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investment in that digital library, but we, the taxpayers, were not.
> That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investment in that digital library, but we, the taxpayers, were not.
Definitionally, if private investors made money, so did the taxpayers:
1) The investors are taxpayers who benefitted.
2) The investors returns were taxed and all future economic activity that came from it was taxed.
3) Societally we got the "digital libraries".
1. US Government has unlimited funding, heck, it came up with 2 trillions _during last month alone_ with some financial alchemy which I don't fully understand. But clearly it's not starving.
2. US Government has kinda poor record producing tangible results during last 30 years, in terms of advancing science, housing, whatever. I mean, can CDC quickly figure out in 2020, are the pieces of cloth on my face help to fight the virus or not? Seems it's still up for discussion.
3. Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff.
So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"? I still not getting it.
I was perhaps too coy.
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660...
I'm not even sure what to say about maps.
Sure, because the government is supposed to provide infrastructure, which in turn allows all kinds of other stuff to flourish on top.
All those examples that private capital gave - who built the internet and spent enough money to create the early market for computers?
>I still not getting it.
If the government is supposed to supply education, health, and infrastructure, then it needs to be paid for somehow. Corporations don't care since there is no immediate monetization possible (plus tragedy of the commons aspects) and the free market simply assumes this stuff appears out of the thin air (externalize the cost somewhere else).
That's an extremely lazy and superficial analysis.
Where did the foundational ingredients for each of those things come from? Computers, networks, video compression, touchscreens, materials, ... heck, even pagerank, and a large fraction of the breakthroughs in ML/AI (till very recently) have come from academia -- through publicly funded research. Companies are very good at solving the "last mile" to apply technologies towards making products, but don't typically have the vision or the wherewithal to pursue deeper innovations.
Yeah yeah, SpaceX exists now, decades after all the very tough and very expensive initial work.
Imagine how much more we could have now if the space program budget was more than a fraction of a percent. That won't be fixed by just giving more money to the govt.
Science is incremental, often is done with out clear end products, and value can only really be measured much later typically in terms of wide spread effect. Like the internet existed decades before everyone used the internet. And only because tax dollars supported it.
Thus if you want more output, they only true solution is to fund much more science than is funded today.
It’s not like “communication“ is an industry that is starving for investment or talent.
The government sucks at spending money. Giving to the banks is the least stupid thing to do. The banks at least have some way to propagate it down to large funds and eventually to smaller funds that have some sense in what is a worthwhile investment or not.
Instead we basically did the opposite, starving federal programs everywhere possible (virtually every entitlement or program that existed in the 80's is smaller today on a per-person-PPP basis). And now we're seeing the results in a crisis that demands an agile and powerful government response.
So I'd sort of flip this around: what was it we did in the last 30 years that destroyed our confidence in our own government? Because it used to work.
And Vietnam, depressed inner cities, social strife, crime and unemployment...
Otherwise, "tax the living hell out of capital" will just cause some more big BOOM sounds somewhere in middle east, and deplete private capital from making more investments at the same time.
There are lots of easy (and easily verifiable) ways to spend government money on things people value. That you think there aren't is sort of the triumph of modern conservatism in a nutshell.
By the way, the formal name for COVID-19's virus is SARS-COV-2.
These are emergency preparedness problems so funding them means setting aside a pile of money and resources until the emergency actually happens. That pile of money makes an attractive target for capital, who can afford to fund campaigns to privatize those services and then get the emergency stockpile as a reward. That sort of maneuver has to go through a vote, but most voters get their understanding of the world through capital-owned media, so that's not much of an obstacle.
Edit: More and more, I think we need worker-owned news.
Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets
All those item were needed 3 weeks ago, but the stock were never fully replenish since. Most of those things are perishable.
WTF.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...
FWIW CA's tax system is pro-cyclical, because they do tax the richest 1%'s more, but the result is that 1%'s don't make any capital gains in recession years so state tax revenues get obliterated during recessions.
I don't think printing money is the answer, if I'm understanding you correctly.
I don't see how concentrating more money in the organization that is the worst at spending it will produce any more value.
Modern govt isn't failing from lack of funds, it's how those funds are spent that is the problem.
What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.
For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't "what to build", it's that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.
Here's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.
One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov't gets 0%.
Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.
None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.