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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Just to be clear: you're talking about federal and state non-military spending.

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.

Why wouldn’t you include state spending? That’s the level of government primarily responsible for infrastructure and education.

I wasn't making a judgment about including or not including state spending. It's just that "US governments" is not a common way for Americans to describe federal and state. People think federal when they see "US government".

Gotcha. Was being lazy and typing on my phone, sorry.

How? The annual federal budget is roughly $7T.

You have to include state and local spending too. We’re at 40% of GDP which works out to almost $13 trillion: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ. Subtract $1 trillion in defense, and we’re spending about $1 trillion a month on government.

Does that chart double-count state transfers to municipalities? When I was in local government, about half our school budget came from the state, so there would be entries on both ledgers.

> governments

Plural implies they count more than the federal government.

Not to mention that data centres are infrastructure!

Other nations are falling behind and will be at a real disadvantage soon.

AI datacenters don't really confer any geographical benefit since their output can be transmitted at extremely low cost. The benefit of local datacenters is purely political and has nothing to do with technological advantage.

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