I think it would be unwise to tax away a financial ecosystem that has driven innovation for the world and funded one of the nation’s largest growth industries in exchange for marginally increasing infrastructure spending.

VC is a tiny corner of the $4T private equity business. In fact all the funds discussed in this article are late stage / crossover funds who put money into established businesses. Hmm, and none based on Silicon Valley.

I am not convinced that we have seen much worthwhile innovation through VC money.

Apple has released innovative products. Many other tech companies, too. Compared to that VC funded business in the last 20 years seems to have been very good at creating personally and socially destructive attention machines to sell advertisement.

That's certainly addictive and has been profitable, and being early movers has allowed the US to capture a lot of value from the rest of the world, but whether it's valuable is another question...

300B is like what, one NYC subway station?

One, maybe two escalator repairs. After a few years of making us walk up stairs.

Yes, I'm bitter. I don't know how these things are so expensive and take so long.

This money is likely already taxed, albeit to a lower rate than usual as most of it is coming from capital gains which caps out at 20% in the USA.

Let's talk real numbers instead of wishy-washy platitudes.

Nov. 2023: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/infrastructu...

This page confirms a 1.2 TRILLION dollar investment into US infrastructure. That's 4 times higher than even if you were to take all that SV money at gunpoint and invest it into infrastructure.

I don't want to defend the "cash pile". The crunch is real, and it sucks, but unless it is hoarded for years to come, it still moves a hell of a lot faster than public money, on much lower numbers overall. And innovation money (which a lot of this cash pile would go towards) tends to benefit the entire world, not just the US.

I don't see how your magic-wand suggestion would benefit anyone any faster, honestly.

Over what timeframe?

Also you conveniently neglect to cite the part of your link where it says that this 1.2 Trillion brings spending levels back to where they were in the mid 2010s, and still way below historical rates.

How about we tax you at 90% and let the money goto into pockets of useless administrators instead of having you spend in your self interest?