I'm not usually for arguments of "this money could have been better spent elsewhere", but here's a thought experiment. Lets say instead of injecting $2 trillion and counting into a few AI companies, we instead injected $2 trillion dollars into things like infrastructure (real infrastructure, not GPU warehouses), education, helping out communities ravaged by globalization (I doubt most people on Hacker News venture outside of coastal areas, but if you want to make a REAL difference as an entrepreneur why not look at parts of the country that are struggling and figure out how you could make a difference there? You know, instead of trying to just ruin the economy for the sake of the already-obscenely-wealthy). I'm not saying all those ventures would succeed, but I think that amount of money put towards boring-but-real problems would make a much bigger positive impact for everyone.

My understanding of injecting money in education is that it's proven to be extremely ineffective at improving outcomes.

Schools just hire more administrators and build nicer gyms.

> ...instead of injecting $2 trillion and counting into a few AI companies...

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.

> we instead injected $2 trillion dollars into things like infrastructure (real infrastructure, not GPU warehouses), education, helping out communities ravaged by globalization

Even excluding military spending, US governments spend $2 trillion every 10 weeks.

It all sounds great, but unfortunately human nature is that money attracts corruption, so how could a $2T injection be managed in a way that ensures everything is square, without adding significant overhead to the spending?

Governments are often just as bad at this as private entities are.

It won't make much difference. The US has a lot of problem, but "not spending enough money" isn't one.

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

People invest in what would get them the highest ROI. No one is really thinking about “improving the world”* when they invest.

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”.

I don't think we don't really know how to do many of these things you list even if we have infinite funds. There is a real chance that we will mess things even more if we have infinite funds...

For context, the US alone spends annually a bit more than $2T on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That money is widely dispersed both geographically and socioeconomically. $2T is not as much as one may think. I think we should let investors put their private money where they wish.

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.

because that's not how this world works, and neither it should. most people figure that out in their early teens.

and fyi, that 2t is not tax money, it's someone's money.

China is showing the world how it's done. Check out how many nuclear reactors they have built in the last 10 years. Turns out having a government that plans long term and actually delivers what they said they would makes a huge difference.

I mean, you want to be annoyed at something, be annoyed at Apple for investing 3x the Marshall plan into China, instead of America.