> No, trying to financially engineer incentives to make all of those things magically happen would not have worked. They tried that with broadband rollout and healthcare and got middling results, at best. Public/private partnerships are a fool's gold standard and it's time to stop getting burned by that scam.
Public/private partnerships are an entirely different thing. There you still have the government dictating what should happen, even if the thing they require is inefficient or miserable, and then you invite a corrupt government contractor that satisfies none of the prerequisites for a competitive market to back their armored car up to the government's vault and suck out all the money.
A carbon tax does not involve any government contractors. You burn carbon, you pay tax. People avoid burning carbon to avoid paying the tax. All of the tax money goes back to the citizens; everybody gets a check cut in the same amount. The imperative is to eliminate space for corruption by leaving no exceptions to the tax and no discretion in where the money goes.
> We wanted the government to get directly involved.
You are implicitly asking for the thing you say you don't like.
In order to install solar panels, the government would have to buy land to put them on, and then buy solar panels. These things come from private sellers. But the government's purchasing process is thoroughly corrupt, so now you're buying solar panels and concrete and transformers from whoever's cronies have the in with the administration. You can't avoid this by trying to say "we'll make our own solar panels then" because for that you'd have to buy semiconductor wafers and fabrication equipment etc. The inputs ultimately have to come from somewhere and the somewhere is going to capture the government.
This is exactly what happened with the WPA and NASA. The term "boondoggle" was coined for the WPA's corruption and inefficiency. Around 90% of NASA's funding goes to government contractors. This is Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, etc. And it's not a new thing:
https://www.gao.gov/assets/hr-93-11.pdf
At the height of the New Deal in 1936, total federal spending, even adjusted for both population growth and inflation to 2024 dollars, was less than $500B. (In unadjusted 1936 dollars it was $8.2B). The current federal budget is over $6T -- right now it's more than twelve times as much in real dollars per capita than it was at the height of the New Deal. The "massive scale" you wanted is more than already happening, but it's not working, because the government doesn't spend money efficiently. It siphons it into the coffers of the connected.