Sometimes I think about the infrastructure projects that could’ve been done instead of a war in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran.

It’s shocking really how wasteful the leaders of the United States can be.

you think China is winning?

China is already in a depression and is just recovering, youth unemployment is high and it has maxed out development.

Government stats lies all the time you only need to look at their stock market for the real info.

Political polarisation is also at a point where it's become sports team-esque. People are willing to go to further extremes to dunk on the other side, even if it means the stadium is becoming increasingly messy.

The oligarchs don't care. If they can make a buck ruining the US, they will, and then they'll move to another country whenever it's convenient for them and do it all again. Borders don't really exist for them.

It's easy to blame the rich here. And certainly they are the ones doing the damage and reaping the rewards.

But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.

If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.

With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.

and yet the oversupply of investment funds looking for projects created the current AI boom here in America, not China.

China “leads” but only in iterating on things already invented.

but we never ask what’s wrong with china that they spend so much on r&d but fail to invent novel things.

With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.

If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:

1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.

2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.

Social programs are the polar opposite of how the US should be spending its money if it wants to outcompete China. Social programs both reduce the incentive for Americans to work while also depriving research/infrastructure projects of funding.