5 ms·
> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own!
by covidacct 6y ago
> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.
What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.
For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't "what to build", it's that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.
Here's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.
One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov't gets 0%.
Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.
None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.
- kortilla 6y agoThat’s not an idea for building, that’s just an idea for the government getting more money. The government clearly doesn’t actually need the money when it cares to do something (based on the stimulus bill and the last decades of deficits).
- covidacct 6y agoFrom my original post: Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets
- jtbayly 6y agoBS. If they were prepared, where did everything go? CA had lower income so they burned all the PPE and shut down hospitals?
- blarglechien 6y agoI don't know about California but the same kinda shit happened in France. In 2007 our health minister had a bad time because she orderer massive amount of tests, masks, and hydro-alcoolic solutions. It was during SRAS, and at the time for 'nothing'. All those item were needed 3 weeks ago, but the stock were never fully replenish since. Most of those things are perishable. WTF.
- battery_cowboy 6y agoStoring shit and maintaining it costs money.
- nerfhammer 6y agoThey scrapped it in 2011 https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavirus-california-mobile-hospitals-ventilators https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi... FWIW CA's tax system is pro-cyclical, because they do tax the richest 1%'s more, but the result is that 1%'s don't make any capital gains in recession years so state tax revenues get obliterated during recessions.
- kortilla 6y agoWell they didn’t really see it coming if they sacrificed it over everything else.
- pazimzadeh 6y agoThe people should have a share of the proceeds if their tax dollars funded the work. I don't think printing money is the answer, if I'm understanding you correctly.
- kortilla 6y agoThey do get a share already through taxation and it doesn’t matter. Money isn’t a good incentive for the government to care.
- pazimzadeh 6y agoI don't follow. I'm talking about giving people shares or proceeds from projects that were funded with the people's wealth.
- kortilla 6y agoWhat people? The government (of the people by the people for the people) already receives all of the tax revenue from successful companies. I don’t see a reason to double dip here.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThe federal government continued to spend trillions of dollars a year during this period of austerity you're referring to. Any liquidation of emergency stocks was not motivated by financial need.
- covidacct 6y agoFederal and state governments are different.
- oxymoron 6y agoA global capital levy is Piketty's central proposal in _Capital in the 21st Century_.
- nopriorarrests 6y agoHonest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?
- ajross 6y agoAren't the last 30 years sort of the problem though? How about we check the 30 years before that: medicare, social security, the tail end of the new deal, the rapid cleanup of acid emissions which were wrecking forests all up and down the east coast... Seems like, starting in the 80's, you would have looked at this and said hey, this government knows what it's doing, we should let it do more stuff. Instead we basically did the opposite, starving federal programs everywhere possible (virtually every entitlement or program that existed in the 80's is smaller today on a per-person-PPP basis). And now we're seeing the results in a crisis that demands an agile and powerful government response. So I'd sort of flip this around: what was it we did in the last 30 years that destroyed our confidence in our own government? Because it used to work.
- nopriorarrests 6y agoYou might be right, I honestly don't know. But if this is the case, maybe first you need to reform the government (in what exact way? and how the reform should be done, politically?) and after first task is accomplished you can feed it with some trillions of dollars? Otherwise, "tax the living hell out of capital" will just cause some more big BOOM sounds somewhere in middle east, and deplete private capital from making more investments at the same time.
- ajross 6y agoHow about "tax the living hell out of capital" on a spending-neutral basis? Pay off the debt. Stimulate local economies. Increase the EITC ceiling. Hell, write a simple UBI statute. There are lots of easy (and easily verifiable) ways to spend government money on things people value. That you think there aren't is sort of the triumph of modern conservatism in a nutshell.
- manigandham 6y agoHow many large companies have come from federal grants? How much would that tax actually generate? If the govt can print money in emergencies as needed, what would the taxes have done? I don't see how concentrating more money in the organization that is the worst at spending it will produce any more value. Modern govt isn't failing from lack of funds, it's how those funds are spent that is the problem.
- timhigins 6y agoSure, govts. should tax the FAANGs of the world more, but having a "stake" in them means govt. interests suddenly align with corporate interests, meaning regulation for the public good gets sidelined. Net neutrality anyone?
- ajross 6y agoNet neutrality was killed without this policy and with no government stake in the tech industry. I don't follow.
- nerfhammer 6y agoIt also potentially means the state partly owns the free speech platforms, which may have some risks.
- nerfhammer 6y agoIt is remarkable how uniformly lethargic the entire political spectrum of the West has been with respect to this crisis until it was too late, while we're seemingly also universally unwilling to build housing or infrastructure across the West, while many Asian countries seem to actually be doing a much better job of all of these things. Instead we sit around and bicker about everything and wait.
- mkl 6y agoMany Asian countries have recent experience with SARS, which led them to get their pandemic game together in advance of this one.
- nerfhammer 6y agoThe West had 2+ months extra lead time during which it mostly didn't even try to do anything, across the political spectrum.
- jtolmar 6y agoTaxing the hell out of capital is a good idea, but our current political reality makes it hard to maintain any public service that's not extremely visible. These are emergency preparedness problems so funding them means setting aside a pile of money and resources until the emergency actually happens. That pile of money makes an attractive target for capital, who can afford to fund campaigns to privatize those services and then get the emergency stockpile as a reward. That sort of maneuver has to go through a vote, but most voters get their understanding of the world through capital-owned media, so that's not much of an obstacle. Edit: More and more, I think we need worker-owned news.