How about we tax it all away and invest in public infrastructure...
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...
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.
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.
Yes, I'm bitter. I don't know how these things are so expensive and take so long.