Govt funds the risky research, and then hands the baton to competitive industry, which is good at 'finding markets', making it a product, and optimizing costs.
Eg, google, amazon, etc, would not exist without the govt early (and continuing) funding of the tech their business is based on.
What is then supposed to happen is that profits are taxed sufficiently, feeding back in to the system, but that part appears to have broken down lately.
The problem in the US isn’t that we don’t tax Google, Amazon, etc. Look at the corporate taxes in France or Sweden. They’re about the same. The problem is that we don’t sufficiently tax the billions in payroll at those companies.
The government isn’t short on money.
Are we sure that the problem isn’t that we are spending Elon Musk’s entire lifetime net worth on the military each and every 90 days while not even at war? We shovel twenty tons of hundred dollar bills (about $2bn) into the neverending pit of the war machine every day.
I’m not convinced more government revenue is the solution to any problems, given what they are doing with their current insanely large levels of revenue at present.
It surely is. The federal government ran a $880 billion deficit in 2018.
> Are we sure that the problem isn’t that we are spending Elon Musk’s entire lifetime net worth on the military each and every 90 days while not even at war?
Yes, definitely. Total government spending at all levels (federal + state + local) is about $7 trillion. The military budget is only 1/10 of that. If we cut our defense spending to the NATO 2% of GDP target, we would save only about $300 billion. We need to cut twice that just to close the structural deficit, and raise taxes by about another trillion to pay for universal healthcare.
You do realise the government is supposed to run a deficit, right? That's quite literally where money comes from.
You can make the case that it's too big ... and it is, but it should run a deficit.
Moreover, most money is not created by the government printing money, it's created by federal reserve purchases of debt or bank lending. Neither of those are reflected in the deficit. The prior poster is thus incorrect to say that the government "needs" to run a budget deficit "because that's where money comes form."
I guess I look at the CEOs who take a symbolic $1 salary-- they're reliant on either selling their plumped securities and other assets (at a low capital-gains tax rate) or borrowing against them (at zero tax rate) to actually cash out living expenses.
The right answer is to just nationalize profitable industries and use them as direct revenue streams. This eliminates much of the need for a formal tax-assessment (return processing, auditing, etc.) system, creating an immediate user-experience improvement and streamlining, and cuts out a lot of the opportunities to cheat. It's not like you can use creative accounting to boost your gas mileage (and reduce your spend at a state-run oil company). Not to mention the huge opportunities to manage for social/political aims (i. e. a state-run telecom will probably honour build-out commitments better than Verizon, because their jobs are all directly accountable to angry legislators)
Yes the problem is the payroll. Silicon Valley people engineers making $500k/year are the most under-taxed people in the country compared to European nations. Our corporate or capital gains taxes are unexceptional. It’s our taxes on the upper middle class—which haven’t been raised since Reagan-that are unusual. These people are the backbone of the tax base funding the welfare state in other countries.
How do you figure? Tax revenues are basically at all time high, and going up further.
Consider that 40% of US GDP now is collected in some form of taxation.[1] 40 cents of every dollar earned is taxed and spent as the government chooses. This is more than between FDR and Regan, and much more than the 20s (~15% of GDP)
Also consider that size of the pie has also increased! US real GDP per capita (accounting for inflation) has grown ~4x since the 1940s, and total GDP has grown ~20x! [2]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Federal%...
right. with the right accounting processes, i could buy the rest. but when spending and tax collection are as decoupled or loosely balanced as they appear to be today, public investment into private industry is super risky.
The claim "By one estimate, the National Institutes of Health spent $17 billion on vaccine technologies fundamental to the Covid-19 vaccine." goes back to the mid-20th Century, is so broad as to be useless and is obviously disqualifying propaganda: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-04-covid-vaccine-built-b...
I think a more interesting comparison would be all national funding for drug R&D versus all corporate R&D funding. This could be done on an annual basis or historic.
NIH budget was 43 billion in 2021 for all healthcare sectors
Top 10 US Drug company[1] R&D budgets [2] were:
1: Johnson & Johnson $15 Billion
2: Pfizer $14 Billion
3: Merck $13 Billion
4: AbbVie $7 Billion
5: Bristol $11 Billion
6: Abbott $3 Billion
7: Amgen $5 Billion
8: Gilead $5 Billion
9: Eli Lilly $7 Billion
10: Biogen 2.5 Billion
Total 91+ Billion
Keep in mind that those are only US headquartered drug companies, and some of the biggest players like Roche and Novartis are in Europe[3]
https://www.pharmapproach.com/top-10-pharmaceutical-companie...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JNJ/johnson-johnso...
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/special-reports/top-10-pharma-...