The Future You're Buying Now Almost Immediately Begins Changing Your Present (Or What To Think About a Mere $2 Trillion Infrastructure Proposal)

1% of household net worth is $1.3 trillion.

Household net worth rose $19 trillion from 1Q to 4Q 2020.

In the Spring of 2021, Biden is proposing an investment of $2 trillion in infrastructure over 8 years.

By no stretch of the imagination is this excessive.

You buy land through simple purchase. You buy the future through investments. The quality and quantity of our investments is an indication of what kind of future we’re trying to buy.

I would love to live in a world in which I feel compelled to holler, "Wait! Don't you think that perhaps we're investing too much in R&D, education, reducing poverty, inclusion, and infrastructure? Aren't we putting too much money into making too many people more productive, creating new knowledge and funding projects to create great new products?"

And if that happens, please just look at me and say, "No. That's a preposterous notion. We would spend even more but for the fact that we've had a momentary lapse of imagination."

One of the many things we’ve learned about these investments? Beyond whatever future education helps kids to create, it creates jobs now. Beyond whatever successful businesses venture capital helps to create, it creates jobs now. Investment doesn’t just change the future. It changes the present. Investments create value twice.

A new highway increases future GDP in the region by making it easier for people to trade and travel. It also increases present GDP as you pay people now to build it. That's one of the more curious things about investments. As you try to change the future, you immediately begin changing the present. And that makes sense. Now was the future just a short while ago.