Journal Roblimo's Journal: Thomas Friedman Makes a Sensible Stimulus Suggestion 3
Friedman's idea, basically, is to help finance new and innovative business instead of propping up dinosaurs like the existing car companies. He says:
You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners -- university endowments and pension funds -- are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors' upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.
Unions, richies with money invested in failing companies, and lots of other pressure groups will scream and cry and mobilize hordes of lobbyists to prevent anything like this from happening on a large enough scale to matter. But it makes far more sense to invest in America's future than to hold on to our past. I don't see this as a "left vs. right" argument, but as a "well, duh" piece that almost everyone who believes in American ingenuity and inventiveness ought to support.
Please read the whole article and let me know what you think.
(This piece can also be read and commented on at roblimo.com.)
Robin (Score:1)
This will be siphoned off to generate a new bubble. Some quick scalpings will be made by top drawer investors, and the rest of the lot will be left like the next school of Worldcom shareholders.
Look at what Matt Taibbi wrote about Friedman - ideologically inclined or not - and it is impossible not to be in agreement with Taibbi's the assessment of TF' as a low-grade shill. One of negligible intellect and disturbingly farcical prose, for the NYT. I can never hear Friedman's name, now, without breaking int
What I Think (Score:2)
What I think is that if the top 20 venture capital firms are short of the neccessary that they are now former venture capital firms.
Friedman's kind of like Cringely, always interesting, though not always right, but with no obvious axe to grind, unlike most of those who want GM to go bankrupt because of their vehement hatred of labor unions. (I don't remember if Cringely's said anything about whether he wants GM bankrupt or not)
Letting GM go bankrupt, though, would probably destroy the upstream parts supplie