Paul GrahamVerified account

Try this thought experiment: If new technology suddenly made it cheap to fix climate change, would Ocasio-Cortez stop wanting to raise taxes? I would guess not. I think the desire to raise taxes precedes the choice of how to spend the money.

Paul, I grew up reading your essays and have a lot of respect for you. But with all due respect, I think you are conflating two separate issues.

1) GND is tackling a huge national project. Of course technological improvements will be necessary to make the transition cheaper, but changing our entire economy won't happen through some single silver bullet. Private industry alone literally cannot do this.

Financing probably WON'T be largely tax revenue. Any time we've done national projects at this scale in the past, it hasn't been. See, e.g., New Deal, WW2 financing, Moonshot. Revenue for GND is not the purpose of higher marginal tax rates.

2) Inequality and wealth gap is itself a problem. Even if we manage to create a country that solved big problems like climate change, continuously reinvented itself, and generated wealth like we did post WW2-era, wealth capture is itself an issue. See: Piketty/@AnandWrites

In my opinion, poverty is more of a problem. And since it's hard to aim at one thing and hit another, even if it seems to be adjacent, I worry that if your goal is to attack inequality, you'll miss poverty.