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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

Honest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?

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Here's one teeny tiny example. They made a smart investment, to the tune of billions of dollars, in computer science. And not just for the past 30 years, but continuously for the past 100 years.

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.

I still do not understand the logic. Let me put it straight.

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.

> Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff

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.

Just to address "producing science".

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.

If some machine takes your money and produces 98% war and 2% science, maybe - just maybe - the only true solution to fund more science is not to put more money into said machine, but change configuration first.

That's true but the machine we currently use doesn't produce 98% war.

> Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff

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.

Public funds for research is a tiny fraction of the funds that the government spends. There are trillions wasted elsewhere that shows that overall it is terrible with spending money productively.

All the same, the reason you have maps on your smartphone can be traced to GPS satellites and ultimately the space program itself, funded by the government.

Yeah yeah, SpaceX exists now, decades after all the very tough and very expensive initial work.

Nobody is denying that. The point is that the government is not lacking for funding but poorly spending the money it already has.

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.

>So, based on these 3 observable points, we should "Tax the living hell out of capital"?

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).

There is 0 evidence to suggest that private corporations wouldn’t have figured out the same thing. Or those same people sitting around at MIT wouldn’t have built the same thing without darpa.

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.

You could make a claim about the internet which would be reasonable but that is also a miniscule portion of what the federal government has done with our money so using a teeny tiny example is more of an exception that proves the rule type of thing. The amount we spend on the Federal government and what we get back for it is crazy bad. The problem is NOT the federal government having too little money. It's a huge proportion of GDP, especially compared to when our government was vastly more effective. The problem is that the institutions that make up our government are dramatically incompetent and squander the massive amounts of funding we give it.

> 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".

Aren't the last 30 years sort of the problem though? How about we check the 30 years before that: medicare, social security, the tail end of the new deal, the rapid cleanup of acid emissions which were wrecking forests all up and down the east coast... Seems like, starting in the 80's, you would have looked at this and said hey, this government knows what it's doing, we should let it do more stuff.

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.

You might be right, I honestly don't know. But if this is the case, maybe first you need to reform the government (in what exact way? and how the reform should be done, politically?) and after first task is accomplished you can feed it with some trillions of dollars?

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.

How about "tax the living hell out of capital" on a spending-neutral basis? Pay off the debt. Stimulate local economies. Increase the EITC ceiling. Hell, write a simple UBI statute.

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.

> How about we check the 30 years before that: medicare, social security, the tail end of the new deal,

And Vietnam, depressed inner cities, social strife, crime and unemployment...

It could give that money back to people and let them spend and invest it? More people free to quit working for someone else and to instead work on 'building' sounds like exactly what Marc is advocating. We have our smartest maths graduates trying to make automated trading algorithms skim an extra .0000001% off a trade, which you could argue is not helping humanity progress. Maybe with UBI they will quit that and work on something more long-term? For Marc's dream to come true it seems like reducing the concentration of wealth and power is the first step.

Food stamps, medicare, TANF, and welfare improve the daily lives of millions. And this money is accountable to the person who spent it, to the person who voted to spend it, to who raised it.

The US funds billions in research, this one time it even resulted in the internet. Probably a good idea to keep doing that.

Well, there were those research efforts that came close to a SARS vaccine until their funding got cut: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/scientists-were-c...

By the way, the formal name for COVID-19's virus is SARS-COV-2.

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