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0 pointsadaisadais5y ago0 comments

Warren Buffett talks about how cash is a bad thing to have over time as it can’t keep up inflation (1). He does advocating having enough on hand to “sleep at night”. But you really can’t build wealth by stocking money away in a savings account.

Trump and his administration could have really done something awesome. He essentially got given the golden ticket for presidents: create a legacy. T. Roosevelt had parka, FDR had the new deal. Eisenhower built highways (which he copied from Hitler’s autobahn). JFK said we would put a man on the moon (and ultimately did).

Trump could have said hey, let’s build high speed rail across our country! Let’s reinforce our highways. Let’s dump a bunch of money into building new schools or paying teachers more. When the virus is gone the economy will be humming! The markets would have soared. The U.S. would have had something qualitative to show for the $2T line of debt we just took out on ourselves.

(1) https://www.cheatsheet.com/uncategorized/history-and-warren-...

0 comments

s1t55y ago

In the meantime Buffett currently holds more cash than just about anyone else on the planet - over $120 billion in cash equivalents at the end of last year.

Yes, his point that cash loses its value over time is true. No, he didn't get to where he is just by holding cash. Yes, your situation and mine are vastly different from Buffett's.

But it just shows that things aren't as simple as "cash=bad".

tathougies5y ago

Cash equivalents include commercial paper and bonds. Cash equivalents are not the same as cash.

bwanab5y ago

There’s a reason they’re called cash “equivalents”.

1 more reply

m11a5y ago

Those presidents had remote wars and recessions as their triggers.

Trump has a pandemic. Ultimately, you can't really go out and build a high speed railway during a pandemic, when you want to enforce social distancing and isolations (construction is the opposite to social distancing). And the US is so big that high speed rail would still be an awful way to go cross-country (it's only really effective within states), perhaps effective for transporting goods but a guess on the data suggests this isn't economic. Dumping money into schools won't fix education, either.

Trump could've perhaps weaponised coronavirus better, but not by through of these ways. That said, he has chartered a course for the most 'socialist' action in recent American history, though: free money. I'd like to see if and how this impacts the future, perhaps it may affect the timeline of implementing a UBI.

Supermancho5y ago

> Dumping money into schools won't fix education, either.

Depending on what you mean by "fix". If colleges payed Silicon Valley salaries, I think the quality of College Education would soar.

DuskStar5y ago

That's not what is generally meant by dumping money into education (normally it refers to primary/secondary education), but I think it holds true here too. After all, we're putting FAR more money into colleges than we did 20 years ago, but very little of that money is going to the professors and it's VERY debatable if there's been any improvement to outcomes due too that funding increase.

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