1) Could've added nifty features to roads (rf beacons?) and make it super easy to build autonomous vehicles. This would've solved so many problems, but most importantly 45,000 lives every year and millions of accidents.
2) Could've given the money to farmers who are getting ethanol subsidies today to add panels, supply tons of power to the grid, creating permanent income to the farmers instead of handouts every year.
3) Could've built many Universities permanently free which is feasible with an endowment that large.
4) Could've built walking/biking infrastructure in most cities, which would help reduce healthcare expenses. Most of the expenses today are lifestyle/metabolic diseases.
5) Could've switched the entire country to clean energy, exporting ALL of the oil and create a sovereign wealth fund.
6) Could've built a city for homeless people with homes, excess energy production (solar) providing the function of a UBI, a massive hospital with health and mental health facilities, de-addiction centers. New city in the middle of nowhere where land is dirt cheap. Army corps of engineers could execute this.
7) Rehabilitate prison (not like George Carlins suggestion of Kansas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkMrFIv_QHk), but more like nordic countries.
8) Build solar over all the interstates.
All this money is being deployed to try and turn a dime into a dollar.
The biggest area I can see where money could be deployed into building something useful -- while generating a positive return -- is real estate development in cities with massive housing shortages. That's basically not allowed in the same cities. In large part, because people who yearn for an more altruistic world care very much about their own quality of life and property values than they do about the well-being of their community in the long run.
Also, some might say that upending the de facto copyright regime in favour of AI companies was an altruistic gift.
Your unstated assumption that investments in AI were private and therefore beyond question simply isn't true.
The AI industry's profits depend to a large degree vast textual corpuses that they acquired and trained on in either straight up illegal or at the least in legally murky contexts; public and private knowledge form the backbone of these enterprises. Said industry then serves AI models to customers via data centers that again off load the cost of inference to the public.
Of course, AI companies could step up pay up their fair share and people will happily treat the prerogatives of private enterprise as private. But until then I think certain quarters of society will continue to believe, rightfully so in my opinion, that AI companies are on the hook for unacknowledged debt.
Of course morality doesn't inform law so the current situation isn't illegal despite how egregious it is. But the law can only attempt to deliver justice, it can't guarantee it. Which is why open, honest, collaborative discussions are important to have exactly now.
My point is that investment here -- "the outlay of money usually for income or profit" -- isn't just giving people stuff altruistically. Investors, here investing in AI, are trying to get a return on their investment.
They aren't just spending money to spend it.
From https://www.cyclinguk.org/briefing/case-cycling-economy:
> For every £1 invested, walking and cycling return an average of around £5-6. A ‘benefit to cost ratio’ (BCR) greater than or equal to 4 is considered to be ‘very high’ value for money. Putting this in some context, the predicted BCR for the HS2 (high speed railway) wasn’t nearly so impressive at about £2.30 for every £1 invested.
Let’s pull on this thread though. This money is investment, in the hope that it grows into more than a trillion.
Right now, this looks like it’s mostly going to displace workers. Some of it will address demand that cannot be addressed directly; you couldn’t afford an editor to look over your emails, now you can.
Much of it will wipe out intern level work across the entire economy, reducing the opportunities for people to learn and develop.
This tech is already devastating education across the globe, and has been built on outright theft of creative work by people who can expect nothing in return.
There was an article on HN how authors of self-help books are seeing a reduction in revenue from book sales, so this is wiping out multiple sources of revenue via automated harvesting of content.
What, precisely, is there to be happy about here? The convenience of writing more code, at the cost of everyone else’s happiness?
There is a LOT better, that could be done with $1 tn.
If we take peoples' retirement investments, and spend it on puppy dogs and ice cream for veterans and children, we're going to be in a worse place than we started a few years down the road.
Maybe the market will crash. Maybe it will grow. It's hard to say, but that's the point if investing.
None of this is based on anything that stands up to scrutiny. This isn't investing, this is buying the story being sold for AI.
Lest we forget, A story whose bull case, automates the jobs of many people who are currently employed, creating a gig economy for white collar work.
Anyone who is buying this, is buying this for the potential future payoff. The firms themselves bleed money at scales that makes the destruction in outright war look like a responsible use of resources.
Not sure you realize how divorced from reality this statement appears (at least to me). These things make fantastic personal tutors for material up though the bachelor's level that are available around the clock and never tire of your inane questions. Currently google offers this for free on their home page without even needing to log in (at least from a residential ISP in the US).
LLMs are found to erode skill
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
LLMs have largely been a net negative on human education systems.
LLMs will revolutionize education for those that care to learn. They will have at least as large an impact on access to knowledge as wikipedia had ~25 years ago.
Also - which kid (or adult) wants to study instead of just play?
Furthermore, Wikipedia (and calculators) were largely free, nor did they come with a side of white collar work automation.
Probably not. Its better explained here: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies
One of the examples from the article: Xavier owns an apartment that he rents out at a loss of $1 billion/month. Seeing this success, he decides to make financial commitments to construct $850 billion in new apartments in places nobody wants them. He convinces Ted to leverage everything he owns to help him build the apartments, telling him that once they are built, every human being on Earth will live in them. Ted contributes $100 billion, part of which immediately goes toward paying off Xavier’s $1 billion/month loss. Forbes gives Xavier and Ted a cover feature, likening their building project to God creating the Heavens and the Earth. Many Fortune 500 CEOs take this comparison literally and establish a new religion around Ted and Xavier, with themselves as high priests. Soon, they start a Holy War with the pope, declaring “Ted and Xavier the One True Gods on Earth” and promising to “purge the nonbelievers” in an official press release. They annex, then subsequently demolish, Vatican City, committing another $900 billion dollars to build new apartments in its place. Forbes hails this as “disruptive,” though it’s not clear how Ted and Xavier plan to finance the project.
This bet includes you.
Not sure about all of your choices in particular but "100 Manhattan projects" caps it all nicely.
Schools just hire more administrators and build nicer gyms.
chop chop... get to it.
Student to teacher ratios have continuously decreased and are about half of what they were in 1960. Data on the results is mixed: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/class-size-what-research-...
What's your own theory ?
We aren't incentivizing meaningful work, we are incentivizing diplomas.
A parallel is when I looked into home births versus hospital births when my wife was pregnant. The statistics of home births crushes hospital births in terms of outcomes. But that's because only healthy women who don't have complications are in the home birth category. Hospitals must admit anyone that shows up in labor, and must handle any negative situations.
Schools now handle so many more kids than they used to, and try to meet the challenge. They are failing because the challenge is too great given the funding, not to mention the corruption of the bureaucracy that inflates administrations.
Maybe use it to increase outcomes.
1) the single thing you cannot beat is capable teachers. And NOT capable as in able to teach, subject-matter-experts. And that is what everybody wants to avoid at all costs.
Put it like this: an unwashed, abrasive, offensive smelly asshole with a master in math can teach kids math. A super-friendly, nice, beautiful, polite social science major (or not even that) who doesn't know math well cannot. The level of teachers needs to be an order of magnitude above the level expected of kids at the end of the class. Knowledge of the subject needs to take absolute precedence in teacher hiring decisions, to the point that good teachers get rejected if lacking expertise in the subject.
This is not how things work. They only worked that way for a short while due to the crash of 89. I've had a French teacher that couldn't speak more than "some" French. Certainly nowhere near fluent.
2) Money needs to support that. Which means for Math, the money for math teachers needs to be competitive with research departments of banks, and very different for different subjects, which seems offensive to schools and government in general. If teaching positions aren't competing with other professional careers in the subject matter, it will never work. This will, of course, mean that many science teachers make more than a school principal and even a district administrator. Deal with it.
For Math, they are literally not even 25% of that, but even for French it's insufficient.
I believe this to be a heavily US-centric view, Estonia and Finland do not pay more for math teachers than they could get in banks' research departments but still manage to get competent teaching across most school subjects.
Things work outside of the US, the issue is the US does not want to look outside and adapt itself to incorporate what's been learnt from other systems. It's a "do the US way or no way" attitude, and it's slowly eroding to become more a "no way" than any kind of "US way" of doing things.
And I do mean easily beat.
I don't think American society has the appetite nor patience for the actions needed for this kind of change.
And, school administrators are the opposite of what's needed in schools: the US needs better teacher pay and more teachers -- the ones who actually teach students.
Short of that however, yes, we get philanthropic failures such as Zuckerberg's attempt in silicon valley, and basically any attempt throughout Africa as examples. Throwing laptops at the problem doesn't work, neither does external donations that get funneled to the wrong places.
Even excluding military spending, US governments spend $2 trillion every 10 weeks.
Plural implies they count more than the federal government.
And about 10% of this is interest. So over the course of a year, the US is paying about $1.25 trillion in interest at the federal and state level.
Other nations are falling behind and will be at a real disadvantage soon.
Also, as an aside, the benefits of globalization on the balance far outweigh the drawbacks. Globalization has been the primary force pulling 3rd world countries out of poverty over the last 80 years.
It’s actual less than $2T IIRC, which makes my point even more.
If "$2T is not as much as you think", and yet we could fund literally tens of thousands of more interesting projects with this money, then we are severely misusing capital in general. My point still stands that we're pouring more money into a technology than ever before, and yet it's a technology that's been a net NEGATIVE socially so far.
What’s scary about the AI boom is people over investing and not being able to recoup their investment which will lead to knock on effects - companies going bankrupt and people losing jobs, savings gone, … etc.
* As ESG has shown, not everyone agrees on what is considered “improving”.
Governments are often just as bad at this as private entities are.
You can then give all of the $2 trillion demurrage dollars directly to the most corrupt individual on the planet and it won't matter.
There are two scenarios:
1. The recipient keeps the money: It will automatically be returned. 2. The recipient spends the money: It has flown from the most corrupt individual on the planet to a less corrupt individual.
If we assume that each transaction allows the next recipient to make a decision on how to best spend the money, it would automatically spread out, since it cannot stagnate and pool up at any given individual.
Short term corruption doesn't pay, because accumulating excess money that you don't need via corruption just means your demurrage fee is higher.
Investing or lending money means giving it to someone that needs it more than you do and since the demurrage defeats the zero lower bound, it is rational to do so even at 0% interest since it allows you to avoid the demurrage.
And here is something that isn't intuitive for people whose mental model assumes permanent capital scarcity. If supply and demand on the money capital markets are balanced out, the expected interest rate is 0%.
Lower capital costs mean that products can be cheaper now. It is also much easier to invest into long term projects, e.g. against climate change, since the investment only needs to break even rather than growing the economy even further.
Oh yeah, also you now get full employment, like classical economic theory predicts. No more automation scare and feeling like the economy is trying to get rid of you or justify removing working class humans or being hostile to them.
The absence of unemployment makes welfare unattractive, which in turn means that governments will simultaneously have more tax payments and less welfare expenses simultaneously. All welfare should be paid out as demurrage currency in all countries. It's completely logical.
Since capital markets are now fair, it is possible to reduce total debt by paying off loans, whereas with permanent money the holder of money can always decide "I'll spend it later" thereby delaying the possibility of paying off a debt using that money, which is implicitly an extension of the duration of the debt. Given an infinite holding duration, the expected duration of the corresponding debt is obviously infinite too (eternal growing debt woooo).
Oh and it could have saved pension systems if it had been adopted ahead of time. Pension systems collapse because shrinking populations yield less output in the future but permanent money tells you that you can build a time machine to take labor from today and just teleport it straight into the future. Who needs young people working for you, if you can let the money work for you instead! Everyone knows the value of a dollar bill is backed by a humanoid robot inside the dollar bill that can perform exactly one dollar of work.
The US government spend a lot on healthcare ($5.3 in 2024)[0]. More than most European countries per capita. But many people still feel that the US hardly has healthcare at all. Pouring more money without a full structural overhaul will likely make things worse.
And the $2T you mentioned is investors' money, which means that your plan is actually to increase tax by $2T and pour it into a system proven inefficient.
[0]: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2025.01683
FWIW, we have a similar problem in Canada where the federal government makes large investments and plans that backfire terribly.
Similar to the "why we spend money exploring space when there are hungry people on Earth?" question, I don't think this is a This Or That argument.
People and companies have different interests, some don't/can't care about education etc so they don't invest in those fields. Forcing these people/companies to invest in areas they don't interested in usually results in bad outcomes that is way worse than just let them be.
But some, do invest in education or civil infrastructure projects. It's not as hot, because... well, usually it makes less money from those things.
The core problem is still that, it is hard to figure out how to invest in such way that it could help the disadvantaged people, while at the same time maintaining a 10 or even 100x growth in the next 5 years.
From the company's perspective, there's no dilemma here, it's 100x growth potential ahead of everything else.
Why not parts of the world even? There are more countries than "the country". Some of us here aren't even from "the country".
and fyi, that 2t is not tax money, it's someone's money.
I don’t know what she’s talking about. I’ve never had a contact group with that title. Out the window my car is doing donuts on an old baseball diamond.
you may think she's just your gal but she may be everyone's pal.
> and we got “Greed is Good” Geckos running things since
This phrase is the opposite of an exaggeration. It sounds like it should not be true, but it really, really is. To be fair though, if you told me in 2015 what the headlines for the 2020s would look like, I would assume you are some kind of satirist or comedian.
What I am saying is that the paper pushers are allocated elsewhere, they are more miserable and shallow minded now, and they have a corrosive long-term effect on society and culture, even though they contribute positively to economic growth. In way, it is trans-generational debt with extra steps.