Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.
Yeah, the world is shitty, and resources aren't allocated ideally. Must it be so?
Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization.
No matter how cheap food and shelter are, there will always be people who can not acquire them. Halting all human progress until the last human is fed and sheltered is a recipe for stagnation. Other cultures handle this with strong family bonds - those few who can not acquire food or shelter for whatever reason are generally provided for by their families.
Too monotonous housing mixes over too large of areas.
Some of us believe that keeping children out of poverty may be an investment in the human capital of a country.
> purposely create underclass
> wait
> act surprised that underclass exists
We know that just straight up giving money to the poorest of the poor results in positive outcomes.
Exactly how large are we talking here?
I have known quite a few 'unhoused' folk, and not many that had jobs. Those that do tend to find housing pretty quickly (Granted, my part of the country is probably different from your part, but I am interested in stats from any region).
People are our first, best resource. Closely followed by technology. You've lost sight of that.
Can I go be a cowboy? Can I just go sleep outside? maybe work a few minimal paying cattle run jobs a year? No? If society won't allow me to just exist outside, then society has an obligation to make sure I have a place to lay my head.
I agree with this. Perhaps that's what is driving the current billionaire class to say "never again!" and making sure that they capture all the value instead of letting any of it slip away and make it into the unwashed undeserving hands of lesser beings.
Chatbots actually can bring a lot of benefit to society at large. As in, they have the raw capability to. (I can't speak to whether it's worth the cost.) But that's not going to improve poverty this time around, because it's magnifying the disparities in wealth distribution and the haves aren't showing any brand new willingness to give anything up in order to even things out.
> Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization.
I agree with this too. Neither is giving handouts to billionaires (or the not quite as eye-wateringly wealthy class). However, giving handouts to struggling people who will improve their circumstances is a very good allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. We haven't figured out any foolproof way of ensuring such money doesn't fall into the hands of layabouts or billionaires, but that's not an adequate reason to not do it at all. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Some of those "layabouts" physically cannot do anything with it other than spending it on drugs, and that's an example of a set of people who we should endeavor to not give handouts to. (At least, not ones that can be easily exchanged for drugs.) Some of those billionaires similarly have no mental ability of ever using that money in a way that benefits anyone. (Including themselves; they're past the point that the numbers in their bank accounts have any effect on their lives.) That hasn't seemed to stop us from allowing things to continue in a way that funnels massive quantities of money to them.
It is a choice. If people en masse were really and truly bothered by this, we have more than enough mechanisms to change things. Those mechanisms are being rapidly dismantled, but we are nowhere near the point where figurative pitchforks and torches are ineffective.
If you want to see what unfettered technological advancement does, you can read stories from the Gilded Age.
The cotton gin dramatically increased human enslavement.
The sewing machine decreased quality of life for seamstresses.
> During the shirtmakers' strike, one of the shirtmakers testified that she worked eleven hours in the shop and four at home, and had never in the best of times made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she worked from 4 o’clock in the morning to 11 at night. These girls had to find their own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages.
These were children, by the way. Living perpetually at the brink of starvation from the day they were born until the day they died, but working like dogs all the while.
What you have just described is people wanting investment in common society - you see the return on this investment but ultra-capitalistic individuals don't see any returns on this investment because it doesn't benefit them.
In other words, you just asked for higher taxes on the rich that your elected officials could use for your desired investment. And the rich don't want that which is why they spend on lobbying.
I didn't check your math here, but if that's true, AI datacenter spending is a few orders of magnitude larger than I assumed. "massive" doesn't even begin to describe it
nVidia's current market cap (nearly all AI investment) is currently 4.4 trillion dollars [2][3].
While that's hardly an exact or exhaustive accounting of AI spending, I believe it does demonstrate that AI investment is clearly in the same order of magnitude as government spending, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually surpassed government spending for a full year, let alone half of one.
1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181
2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ
3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4poi...
It is clearly not in the same order of magnitude
Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much on the pie chart to redirect percentage wise. About 60% goes to non-discretionary programs like Social Security and Medicaid, and 13% is interest expense. While "non-discretionary" programs can potentially be cut, doing so is politically toxic and arguably counter to the goal of a better society.
Of the remaining discretionary portion half is programs like veterans benefits, transportation, education, income security and health (in order of size), and half military.
FY2025 spending in total was 3% over FY2024, with interest expense, social security and medicare having made up most of the increase ($249 billion)[1], and likely will for the foreseeable future[2] in part due to how many baby boomers are entering retirement years.
Assuming you cut military spending in half you'd free up only about 6% of federal spending. Moving the needle more than this requires either cutting programs and benefits, improving efficiency of existing spend (like for healthcare) or raising more revenue via taxes or inflation. All of this is potentially possible, but the path of least resistance is probably inflation.
[1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/
[2] https://www.crfb.org/blogs/interest-social-security-and-heal...
I think the biggest lever is completely overhauling healthcare. The USA is very inefficient, and for subpar outcomes. In practice, the federal government already pays for the neediest of patients - the elderly, the at-risk children, the poor, and veterans. Whereas insurance rakes in profits from the healthiest working age people. Given aging, and the impossibility of growing faster than the GDP forever, we'll have to deal with this sooner or later. Drug spending, often the boogeyman, is less than 7% of the overall healthcare budget.
There is massive waste in our military spending due to the pork-barrel nature of many contracts. That'd be second big bucket I'd reform.
I think you're also right that inflation will ultimately take care of the budget deficit. The trick is to avoid hyperinflation and punitive interest rates that usually come along for the ride.
I would also encourage migration of highly skilled workers to help pay for an aging population of boomers. Let's increase our taxpayer base!
I am for higher rates of taxation on capital gains over $1.5M or so, that'll also help avoid a stock market bubble to some extent. One can close various loopholes while at it.
I am mostly arguing for policy changes to redistribute more equitably. I would make the "charity" status of college commensurate with the amount of financial aid given to students and the absolute cost of tuition for example., for example. I am against student loan forgiveness for various reasons - it's out of topic for this thread but happy to expand if interested.
It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.
So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.
OpenAI isn't spending $1 trillion in hard earned cash on data centres, that is funny money from the ocean of financial liquid slushing around, seeing alpha.
It also certainly is not a cohort of accredited investors putting their grandchildren's inheritance on the line.
Misaligned incentives (regulations) both create and perpetuate that situation.
"earned", that may be the case with millionaires, but it is not the case with billionaires. A person can't "earn" a billion dollars. They steal and cheat and destroy competition illegally.
I also take issue with the idea that someone can do whatever they want with their money. That is not true. They are not allowed to corner the market on silver, they aren't allowed to bribe politicians, and they aren't allowed to buy sex from underage girls. These are established laws that are obviously for the unalloyed benefit of society as a whole, but the extremely wealthy have been guilty of all of these things, and statements like yours promote the sentiment that allows them to get away with it.
Finally, "great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way". No. You might be able to argue that today's advanced computing technology wouldn't have happened without private capital allocation (and that is debatable), but the breakthroughs that saved millions of lives--vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, for example--were not the result of directed private investment.
That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen.
Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind).
As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.
In rebellion against a king who seemed to want to exploit us and felt that his being king made him the source of the rights we had.
Maybe we need to re-think the relationship with corporations the same way? Re-structure so that they serve the common good?
Many of the above were discovered by people explicitly rejecting profit as an outcome. Most of the above predate modern capitalism. Several were explicitly government funded.
Do you have a single example of a scientific breakthrough that saved tens of millions of lives that was done by capital owners?
https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/06/california-homeless-t...
Note that Houston’s approach seems to be largely working. It’s not exactly cheap, but the costs are not even in the same ballpark as AI capital expenses. Also, upzoning doesn’t require public funding at all.
If I had to live outdoors in one of these places, all other thing being equal, I would pick CA for the weather. But if I had trouble affording housing, I think Houston wins by a huge margin.
The governor of Texas bragged about sending 100k homeless people to california (spending about $150 million in the process).
>in the Golden State, 439 people are homeless for every 100,000 residents – compared to 81 in the Lone Star State.
If I'm doing my math right, 81 per 100k in a state of 30 million people means 24k homeless people. So the state brags about bussing 100k homeless people to California, and then brags about only having 24k homeless people, and you think it's because they build an extra 100k houses a year?
The same math for California means that their homeless population is 175k. In other words, Texas is claiming to have more than doubled California's homeless population.
Maybe the reason Texas can build twice as many homes a year is because it literally has half the population density?
I don't want to get deep in the philosophical weeds around human behavior, techno-optimism, etc., but it is a bit reductive to say "why don't we just give homeless people money".
They shouldn't just enable them, as a lot of homeless are happy in their situation as long as they get food and drugs, they should force them to get clean and become a responsible adult if they want benefits.
https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=2629
https://youtu.be/nWWRFA8v6aE?t=3000
He was a physics grad, did some experiments with out of body experiences, decided the Universe is a simulation for immortal consciousness to experience making choices and dealing with their consequences, and reasoned from there that the purpose of life is to get rid of ego and fear and learn to benefit others instead of ourselves.
Quite how he got from one to the other isn't clear to me, or why it's physics related; the message seems to be a familiar religious one, deal with whatever struggles happen to you and try to be egoless and kind.
I suspect this is a much more complicated issue than just giving them food and shelter. Can money even solve it?
How would you allocate money to end obesity, for instance? It's primarily a behavioral issue, a cultural issue
Healthy food is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing.
Exercise is expensive, do things to make that relatively cheaper and thus more appealing.
Walkable cities are another issue. People shouldn't have to get in their car to go anywhere.
It's clear we are Wile E. Coyote running in the air already past the cliff and we haven't fallen yet.
We need an order of magnitude more clean productivity in the world so that everyone can live a life that is at least as good as what fairly normal people in the west currently enjoy.
Anyone who think this can be fixed with current Musk money is simply not getting it: If we liquidated all of that, that would buy a dinner for everyone in the world (and then, of course, that would be it, because the companies that he owns would stop functioning).
We are simply, obviously, not good enough at producing stuff in a sustainable way (or: at all) and we owe it to every human being alive to take every chance to make this happen QUICKLY, because we are paying with extremely shitty humans years, and they are not ours.
Bring on the AI, and let's make it work for everyone – and, believe me, if this is not to be to the benefit of roughly everyone, I am ready to fuck shit up. But if the past is any indication, we are okay at improving the lives of everyone when productivity increases. I don't know why this time would be any different.
If the way to make good lives for all 8 billions of us must lead to more Musks because, apparently, we are too dumb to do collectivization in any sensible way, I really don't care.
This time there is the potential to replace human workers. In the past it only made them more productive.
The difference is that previously there still had been plenty of (low skill) jobs where automation didn't work. Pizza delivery, taxi driver, lots of office jobs with repetitive tasks etc.
Soon there will be nothing for the average joe as the machine will be better in all tasks he could perform.
Gigantic mega-corporations do enjoy increased growth and higher sales, don't they? Or am I mistaken?
Do you think shareholder don't spend money, but employees do or something?
Give a rich person a million dollars, and they will put it in an offshore tax shelter. That’s not exactly driving economic activity.
Money in tax shelter doesn't go threw a portal in another universe. Its either invested or saved as some kind of asset and in that form is in circulation. And again, even if you assume it increases monetary demand (decreases velocity) the central bank targets AD and balances that out.
Based on your logic, a country that taxes 100% of all income and redistrubtes it would become infinity rich. Your logic is basically 'if nobody saves and everybody spends all income' everybody will be better off.
This is not how the economy works even if it feels good to think that. Its a fallacy.
Where you could have a point is that potentially the tax impact is slightly different, but that's hard to prove.
https://bsi-economics.org/rising-income-inequality-and-aggre...
If we're being realistic a bunch of this will go to paying off existing debt. Still good, but not the economic stimulus you're imagining. There are also "services" like gambling apps that act as a sponge to soak up money from those foolish enough to use them and transfer that money back to the wealthy shareholders. I'm sure there is research on what percentage of that $1000 can be expected to stimulate the economy, but it's not 100%.
Corruption is killing this country.
Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.
The more economically correct way to express this would be that entrepreneurs and companies who innovated increase productivity and that makes the overall economy more efficient allowing your country to grow.
> Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.
This just sounds like quarter baked economics ideas you have made up yourself. Neither 'trickle down' nor 'trickle up' are concepts economist use. And that you confidently assert anything about the social outcomes of these 'concepts' is ridiculous.
If the voters can't even figure out why the debt keeps going up, I think you are fighting a losing battle.
Stock buybacks from who? When stock gets bought the money doesn't disappear into thin air; the same cash is now in someone else's hands. Those people would then want to invest it in something and then we're back to square one.
You assert that if not for AI, wealth wouldn't have been spent on materials, land, trades, ect. But I don't think you have any reason to think this. Money is just an abstraction. People would have necessarily done something with their land, labor, and skills. It isn't like there isn't unmet demand for things like houses or train tunnels or new-fangled types of aircraft or countless other things. Instead it's being spent on GPUs.
Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders, which are already disproportionately wealthy and already heavily allocated to financial assets. A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled into more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc), not into large, lumpy, real world capex that employs a bunch of electricians, heavy equipment operators, lineworkers, land surveyors, etc. AI infra does that. Even if the ultimate economic owner is the same class of people, the path the money takes is different: it has to go through chip fabs, power projects, network buildouts, construction crews, land acquisition, permitting, and so on. That’s the “leakage” I was pointing at.
To be more precise: I’m not claiming “no one would ever build anything else”, I’m saying given the current incentive structure, the realistic counterfactual for a lot of this megacap tech cash is more financialization (buybacks, M&A, sitting on balance sheets) rather than “let’s go fund housing, transit tunnels, or new aircraft.”
For example: "Buybacks concentrate cash in the hands of existing shareholders" is obviously false: the shareholders (via the company) did have cash and now they don't. The cash is distributed to the market. The quoted statement is precisely backwards.
> A big chunk of that cash just gets recycled
That doesn't mean anything.
> more financial claims (index funds, private equity, secondary shares, etc)
And do they sit on it? No, of course not. They invest it in things. Real actual things.
> buybacks
Already discussed
> M&A
If they use cash to pay for a merger, then the former owners now have cash that they will reinvest.
> balance sheets
Money on a balance sheet is actually money sitting in J.P. Morgan or whoever. Via fractional reserve lending, J.P. Morgan lends that money to businesses and home owners and real actual houses (or whatever) get built with it.
The counterfactual for AI spending really is other real actual hard spending.
I am sure the goat herders in rural regions of Pakistan will think themselves lucky when they see the terrible sight of shareholder value being wantonly destroyed by speculative investments that enhance the long-term capital base of the US economy. What an uncivilized society.
But I don't see the mechanics of how it would work. Rewind to October 2022. How, exactly, does the money* invested in AI since that time get redirected towards whatever issues you find more pressing?
*I have some doubts about the headline numbers
Surely an artificial one in a data center, costing trillions and beholden to shareholders, will solve all society's issues!