The amount that the US spends on R&D is a rounding fraction of the excess of military budget compared to other nation's military budgets. And by scaring off most other countries from buying US military supplies in the future, as Trump has been doing, we will end up paying a ton more for less military hardware now.
The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.
the current ai boom started here in america with private funds. china is spending government funds in a desperate attempt not to lose the race. it’s not clear that china is in the stronger position, at least yet.
I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]
Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% and Japan 26%.
So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.
The way the US is aggressively footgunning itself, while China (and others) win by default is so frustrating. The US could have invested in clean energy, in social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression.
Like, it's really not that hard. Yes, we'd have to squeeze the richest people and share a little more equally. But not even that much. Like, the rich would still be astonishingly wealthy.
It's just... devastating to see oligarchs who can't just accept being slightly less oligarchic resulting in the collapse of an entire country.
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.
More than that, China funds polarization and disinformation projects in the west. Recently they've been seemingly funding anti-AI rhetoric in the US (1). There's allegations they're funding pro-Palestine protests in the UK (2).
Makes sense to sow discord among your rivals. The US certainly does the same.
Pro Palestine protests come from people looking at Genocide and going, "I don't like genocide. We should not support genocide."
It's not particularly complicated. Anyone looking for a more complicated geopolitical actor here is ignoring the very, very obvious root cause -- genocide is bad.
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." - The 1988 Hamas Covenant
Israel is fighting a war for it's very existence against an enemy whose very founding documents encode the idea that there can never be peace until Israel is destroyed. After October 7th Hamas doubled down and said they would not rest as long as they lived. Still they insist, even after all the destruction.
What choice does Israel have except to grant them their wish and fight until none of them live? They will not accept surrender, and they will never rest until Israel has been annihilated. They have insisted on that point since the 80's and on October 7th they proved that they are still dedicated to that principle. How could anyone doubt their convictions? Hamas means what they say, and what they say is that as long as they live they will continue to attack Israel.
Do you honestly believe there can ever be peace with someone who has sworn to their God that there can never be peace?
I don't have any personal stake in this, and I'm sorry if you do. It's just that from an outside perspective I can't understand yours at all.
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.
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.
That is why China is losing to the US. China massively more social programs than the US and it has reduced their economy to shambles because no one has incentive.
> China forces its citizens to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
As someone who lived there for 5 years, this is laughable and totally untrue.
I'm guessing you heard that some tech companies have a 996 policy and inferred that the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker in China.
Actually most, programmers have protested a few years ago to no veil. The movement is called 996.icu if you are interested, and they complied lists of companies that run 996 schedule and the normal 955.
> the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker
Of course not, the gov with communism in its name is simply not enforcing their own labor law and cracking down labor movements.
If you work in China, you get their universal healthcare but you still need a private insurance policy. It’s hard to explain though, you wouldn’t be completely up sh*t creek without a private policy, but some things become really inconvenient, and the standard of care is different (bring your own nurse in the public plan).
China sort has welfare but the hukou system means most people who need it don't qualify in the city they live in.
- Private insurance is always up to one's own, very few employers provide this.
- If young, your parents or yourself have to pay for coverage until you graduate, otherwise no coverage.
- If elderly, depends on your employment history. To qualify, your employers have to contribute continuously for decades and it's tied with social security. Otherwise you are on your own.
- If working age but no job, similar to being young you have to pay.
Pretty much everywhere has proved that ensuring people have a place to shelter and eat doesn't stop them from wanting to do something with their lives. It's the oldest and most wrong talking point from this debate.
This is completely wrong. A majority of people only work because it's necessary to put food on the table and purchase other necessities. You know this is true because you can see how many of them choose to do nothing productive with their free time. Basically nobody is performing research in their free time.
I concur, a majority are not productive most of the time. However a majority is far from everyone.
Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.
Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.
Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.
Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.
Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.
Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.
When someone tries to argue based solely on "common sense logic" like this comment, we all know it's baseless. If there was any truth to your statement, you'd refer to statistics that show your idea to be true, but it isn't.
If it is about "incentivizing people to work" and getting warm butts in chairs or out swinging hammers... well, how are we going to compete with a country that has 4x the number of warm bodies?
We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.
We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.
It's amazing how people think this is true when by every known metric, people who are given a minimally comfortable life almost always end up being far more productive members of society than those who are not.
Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.
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.
You go to a chinese city today it looks like the future short of flying cars. All the novel things we invent here and cities look the same as they did 30 years ago, only more people in tarps on the side of the road.
What is "wrong" is that they have a culture of being conversative when it comes to 0-1 innovation. Everything is set up to reward concrete results. With 0-1 innovation you have no idea whether it's viable, so few people have the risk appetite and would rather pursue proven venues.
But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.
0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.
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.
Winning is a strong word, but they have significantly higher home ownership, purchasing power, less drug addiction, and generally safer big cities.
I believe the average worker in a tier 1-3 Chinese city is better off than a living in a North American City. Or at least, my content feed leads me to think this way.
The section 8 people in the US lives better than an average worker in a tier 1 city. Their apartment rentals are inhuman and they make 1/10 of American minimum wage. They can't get a gf and have to resort to prostitutes because of the gender inbalance.
Have you looked at China from 15 years ago? It was also said to be in a depression and youth unemployment was also high. Just look at articles from back then.
What people don't seem to understand is that China is developing in stages. Every 10 years there is a new stage, a new revolution, with different winners and losers. Maxxing out on the previous growth engine was already forseen 10 years ago. That's why they bit the bullet and decided to pay the price to transition to the next growth engine. All transitions are painful.
Besides, these are Chinese we're talking about. They'd even complain about the economy being bad even when it's growing 10% and they drive away in 2 luxury cars. When they say they're "barely surviving" they mean their savings account isn't growing.
When you look at the bad economy in China, are you looking at the costs, or are you looking at the development goals? Development goals have costs, not paying those costs to reach goals has even bigger costs pater on. The Made in China 2025 goals have already been largely achieved.
You made a mistake, an order of magnitude. It's over 135k per year taxed at 45%. Of course none of the rich people pay this tax, because they don't receive salaries.
I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024...
(But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.
There's a legitimate border between Mexico and the US.
People are expected to cross it; I've done it myself. 11M crossing that border sounds like a number that could be correct of the amount of unique people that cross it.
There's a legitimate war between Ukraine and Russia.
People are expected to kill; I've done it myself. 1M killings in that war sounds like a number that could be correct of the amount of unique people that killed in it.
>People are expected to cross it
People are expected to cross it legally. Congrats, you played yourself.
This battle was lost 20 years ago, and to reverse it you would need to go back 40 years to prevent US industry from outsourcing to China after it joined the WEF.
You can't divorce engineering from manufacturing, because designing better stuff heavily favors those who also make the stuff. The US was convinced otherwise by economists who don't believe in nation-states, because shareholders correctly saw that they could make massive profits by paying Chinese wages rather than American wages. But now China builds more ships in a year than the US does in a decade, and all of a sudden, the chickens have come home to roost. It will take generations for the US (and indeed the West in general) to regain what was given away, if it's even possible.
I’d wager it didn’t happen due to the advice of economists who don’t believe in nation states. What happened is the natural conclusion of optimizing for maximum profit and giving capital (read i.e. corporations) the means to do so.
Any attempt at course correction is now labeled with “government overreach, socialism, communism”, etc. in an absurd way.
It's both. Governments correctly realized that you don't outsource technologies that are critical to your defense toolchain, which is why Boeing still makes planes in Everett and not in China. The oversight was not realizing the extent to which all technologies feed into one another. Eventually, you're trying to get electromagnetic launchers working on your aircraft carriers, and you're discovering that you don't have that capability, because administrations 30 years ago let electronics manufacturing go to China. So not only do you not have the capability of doing the thing that you wanted to do, but your adversary has reached a level of electronics manufacturing that your country never achieved.
It's treason if you or I leak secrets to China, and I'd argue that it would also be treason if Lockheed or Boeing wanted to make jets vital to US military interests in China. But if you sell public assets that are subsequently bought by the Chinese, or you move manufacturing that feeds the logistical supply chain, and subsequently erode local capability, that's actually fine.
The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests. It's that second part that has been lacking.
> The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests.
True that! But the US government is defanged (where it matters), lobbied to death and captured.
Also you never know what could one day prove to be critical to sovereign interests. It’s not one industry. It’s all of them together at the same time, from building the screws to hold your phone together to the advanced chips that AI runs on.
You'll need to be a bit more specific in your claims here, because I'm not following. What is being centralized? Because the last 40 years has been about decentralizing supply chains and manufacturing. What political movement are you referring to, and how are large corporations and the wealthy benefiting?
If China is to the 21st century what the US were to the 20th century - economically, scientifically, industrially - what should I do as a US citizen working in tech, besides signing up my kids and myself for Chinese classes?
Yes I know, that's not what I said though, with "here" being the US and "there" being China. Just taking language classes in the US for Chinese aren't likely to be helpful.
I'm quite lucky in that i have the right to live and work in America, Australia, New Zealand, UK and the EU. I've also thought about this a lot as i near retirement (working in tech in the USA atm, it's been a fun ride but definitely time to think about options).
Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.
Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.
Exports more than it imports.
Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!
An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.
Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.
I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
Uhm, resource curses are seriously a thing. A lot of countries are poorer because they have natural resources and fail to develop other aspects of their economies. For every Norway you have two south sudans.
I have EU, Australian and Brazilian passports, so I could live in even more countries including the Mercosul region. I actually live in the EU because of its culture, food, more advanced startup scene and tech companies. Living quality is very similar here and in Australia, what makes the difference is whether you prefer to avoid too cold or too hot weather. Swedens finances are actually better than Australia s as far as I know.
I couldn’t imagine a better place to live than Northern Europe, but Australia is a close second for me. Been to China, Japan, Canada, the US and I think parts of those countries are also really nice to live, just not a good match for me culturally.
Now South America is a different story. If you like good weather and a festive atmosphere it’s actually the best place to live, just don’t expect to have money or to live in a functioning state where services work!
> I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
It's impossible for every country to be a net exporter so I don't see the issue on "care about importing more than exporting", exporting high-value added products and services while importing products/services lower in the value chain is how countries that aren't so lucky as Australia with immense natural wealth and low population get to be rich as well.
Many countries in the EU also have a balanced budget, it's a mixed bag, France overruns its revenue consistently, Germany had a debt brake and until the past few years consistently had surpluses, Sweden has quite low debt and a balanced budget, the Netherlands has a small deficit, so on and so forth. So it's entirely country-dependent instead of being a general EU issue.
The UK was still doing quite well after the Suez crisis, but the oil shock and thatcherism was when deindustrialization really hit. Try to prevent that.
The UK learned the exact wrong lesson from Suez in my view, it learned it must never get on the wrong side of Washington when the correct lesson to learn was that it must never be dependent on Washington. France provides an interesting counterfactual here.
I get the intention, but I feel it may be a particularly extreme comparison, since the US being what it was to the 20th century involved two world wars, decolonization, the cold war, and decades of reconstruction.
Currently, even if China pulls ahead, it doesn't have to mean things getting worse in the US. Contrary to what the current government seems to believe, growth is not necessarily zero sum. Despite Americans' perception of Europe, they too remain competitive in various domains of research. Similarly with, say, Japan.
To be fair, I think it's mainly America that bought its own propaganda about being inherently superior to everyone else.
Most of the populist nonsense ultimately comes down to their delusion that they're being cheated out of the position they deserve as inherently superior people.
Most people live in "other countries". Like the whole of Europe. And we have been doing just fine. Many of us have worked in tech this whole time too. It's gonna be fine even if you dont live in the leader country (anymore).
Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.
Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.
I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
I disapprove of the Iran war, but to play devils advocate: there's a major shift occurring right now in the way wars are fought. The Ukraine-Russia war has made it clear that conventional militaries will find themselves in a meat grinder in the next war.. that includes the US.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
Trumo hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.
It's true that China is remarkable, but the concern is that China is too large.
Basically, these cutting-edge industries require industrial chains to be connected across different countries, but China can do almost everything within its own borders. China's greatness is greatness, but if China becomes highly developed, will this kind of technological development spread to neighboring countries?
U.S. industry, for one, spreads to many countries through outsourcing. But China can consume outsourcing within its own borders. If that happens, what will become of it?
I don't understand the complaint, China will just continue progressing while the rest of the world falls behind. It'd be the same as it has always been in Chinese history, in terms of isolationism.
Product development is one of the first things PE cuts when they get their hands on a company. It's a form of investment and vulture capital hates all investment because their goal is to extract short term profits.
The ones really funding research are VCs, governments and founders taking bank loans.
2 education is practically sacred in Chinese culture
It is only natural that after China's century of Western humiliation and Mao's delusional cultural revolution that the country is retaking it's rightful place.
I'm curious why you ask the question, Do you think the Cultural Revolution (this was the anti-intellectual movement in the 1960s-1970s, not either of the literal revolutions China experienced in the 20th century) somehow helped China?
Not to sound like a broken record here but the big problem is housing. When housing becomes the best investment, it cannibalizes capital investment into productive output.
There have been other errors along the way, such as the Bayh-Doyle Act [1], a law signed by Jimmy Carter in a lame duck session after losing to Ronald Reagan to essentially give away NIH research. I'm a firm believer that federal research dollars should come with equity strings attached in the results. Otherwise, fund your own research. And in pharmaceuticals, it's basically all federal research, despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't. Actually there's one thing it does invest in: patent extension.
Also, we've addicted to fossil fuels, IMHO because it induces demand for weapons.
One big difference between the US and China is that China has significant capital controls so China has a captive market of over $100T in household savings that has to be invested in something and it can't just leave. This too creates problems but the gains in China and decrease in costs cannot be dismissed easily. Also, China has basically managed to recreate all the technologies the US has tried to restrict from being exported to China, everything from welding large container ships to the latest and greatest lithography and manufacturing.
But housing absolutely needs to stop being an investment. It's a huge reason why the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out in the West.
In 2026 saw a Japan news site report a thing in 2024..its so Japan. ok jokes aside:
All of this is actually bound to happen, and it is laid out clearly in China's Five-Year Plans. Industrial upgrading is something China is bound to do, and it is bound to succeed—a colossal nation built on Confucian moral values with science as its religion.
Of course, if we ask the classic "but at what cost," it's that wealth distribution in these emerging high-tech industries is deeply unequal. Being right in the middle of it, every day I see two extremes: some company is hiring AI interns for 5,000 yuan a day, or offering PhD graduates an annual salary of 1 million yuan! Yet at the same time, massive numbers of people are unemployed, and countless others are living on baseline minimum wages.
If China truly wants to become a socialist country, beyond technological progress, it must properly resolve the inequality issues brought about by the reform and opening-up.
What a bizarre swipe. Countries don't necessarily post specific statistics like this so quickly and 2 years behind is actually pretty fast. And even though it took them 4-5 months to see the OECD numbers, Nikkei and Yomiuri seem to be the only two English language outfits reporting on this. They actually posted at around the same time many Chinese language outfits noticed.
121 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadThe "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.
private funds until the bubble pops, then it becomes public funds for the bailout.
same as 2008.
Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% and Japan 26%.
So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a0ffc43a-231a-40aa-b5f9-521757830... => https://archive.li/k3PEH
Like, it's really not that hard. Yes, we'd have to squeeze the richest people and share a little more equally. But not even that much. Like, the rich would still be astonishingly wealthy.
It's just... devastating to see oligarchs who can't just accept being slightly less oligarchic resulting in the collapse of an entire country.
Makes sense to sow discord among your rivals. The US certainly does the same.
1: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backla... 2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/13/china-funding-pr...
It's not particularly complicated. Anyone looking for a more complicated geopolitical actor here is ignoring the very, very obvious root cause -- genocide is bad.
Israel is fighting a war for it's very existence against an enemy whose very founding documents encode the idea that there can never be peace until Israel is destroyed. After October 7th Hamas doubled down and said they would not rest as long as they lived. Still they insist, even after all the destruction.
What choice does Israel have except to grant them their wish and fight until none of them live? They will not accept surrender, and they will never rest until Israel has been annihilated. They have insisted on that point since the 80's and on October 7th they proved that they are still dedicated to that principle. How could anyone doubt their convictions? Hamas means what they say, and what they say is that as long as they live they will continue to attack Israel.
Do you honestly believe there can ever be peace with someone who has sworn to their God that there can never be peace?
I don't have any personal stake in this, and I'm sorry if you do. It's just that from an outside perspective I can't understand yours at all.
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.
As someone who lived there for 5 years, this is laughable and totally untrue.
I'm guessing you heard that some tech companies have a 996 policy and inferred that the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker in China.
Actually most, programmers have protested a few years ago to no veil. The movement is called 996.icu if you are interested, and they complied lists of companies that run 996 schedule and the normal 955.
> the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker
Of course not, the gov with communism in its name is simply not enforcing their own labor law and cracking down labor movements.
China sort has welfare but the hukou system means most people who need it don't qualify in the city they live in.
If you work, you automatically get enrolled in a hybrid healthcare system (state+private)
If you are young or elderly you get automatic coverage.
If you are working age but have no job --then you get basic healthcare (not comprehensive)
Lots of people who can afford will buy private insurance on top if they have a serious illness (basic healthcare is not comprehensive)
- Private insurance is always up to one's own, very few employers provide this.
- If young, your parents or yourself have to pay for coverage until you graduate, otherwise no coverage.
- If elderly, depends on your employment history. To qualify, your employers have to contribute continuously for decades and it's tied with social security. Otherwise you are on your own.
- If working age but no job, similar to being young you have to pay.
Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.
Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.
Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.
Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.
Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.
Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.
So maybe "majority" isn't really the right term?
We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.
We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.
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.
But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.
0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.
It’s shocking really how wasteful the leaders of the United States can be.
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.
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.
I believe the average worker in a tier 1-3 Chinese city is better off than a living in a North American City. Or at least, my content feed leads me to think this way.
What people don't seem to understand is that China is developing in stages. Every 10 years there is a new stage, a new revolution, with different winners and losers. Maxxing out on the previous growth engine was already forseen 10 years ago. That's why they bit the bullet and decided to pay the price to transition to the next growth engine. All transitions are painful.
Besides, these are Chinese we're talking about. They'd even complain about the economy being bad even when it's growing 10% and they drive away in 2 luxury cars. When they say they're "barely surviving" they mean their savings account isn't growing.
When you look at the bad economy in China, are you looking at the costs, or are you looking at the development goals? Development goals have costs, not paying those costs to reach goals has even bigger costs pater on. The Made in China 2025 goals have already been largely achieved.
China rejected the ideology of squeezing the rich and became wealthy. Why would you like to do exact opposite and expect to come on top?
The US taxes income over $626k/year at 37%, and offers STEEP discounts on that rate if your income is from capital gains.
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.
Between 2020 and 2024 the admin let over 11M people walk across the US southern border. It was over 200,000 per month.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...
Since deportations have basically wound down those people are effectively being given amnesty.
2024 should have been THE year to see any positive effects of immigration.
I saw numbers for inadmissibles, expulsions and apprehensions. Are those the numbers your are referring to?
I don't get it. Weren't those the waves of people after the pandemic, the numbers showing how many were turned around?
11M sounds like peanuts.
The site you linked is recording the amount of people not allowed to cross so not really helpful to computing 11M.
>11M sounds like peanuts.
How many people do you think are murdered in the US monthly?
1 murder sounds like peanuts.
People are expected to cross it; I've done it myself. 11M crossing that border sounds like a number that could be correct of the amount of unique people that cross it.
People are expected to kill; I've done it myself. 1M killings in that war sounds like a number that could be correct of the amount of unique people that killed in it.
>People are expected to cross it
People are expected to cross it legally. Congrats, you played yourself.
You can't divorce engineering from manufacturing, because designing better stuff heavily favors those who also make the stuff. The US was convinced otherwise by economists who don't believe in nation-states, because shareholders correctly saw that they could make massive profits by paying Chinese wages rather than American wages. But now China builds more ships in a year than the US does in a decade, and all of a sudden, the chickens have come home to roost. It will take generations for the US (and indeed the West in general) to regain what was given away, if it's even possible.
Any attempt at course correction is now labeled with “government overreach, socialism, communism”, etc. in an absurd way.
It's treason if you or I leak secrets to China, and I'd argue that it would also be treason if Lockheed or Boeing wanted to make jets vital to US military interests in China. But if you sell public assets that are subsequently bought by the Chinese, or you move manufacturing that feeds the logistical supply chain, and subsequently erode local capability, that's actually fine.
The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests. It's that second part that has been lacking.
True but one is the consequence of the other.
> The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests.
True that! But the US government is defanged (where it matters), lobbied to death and captured.
Also you never know what could one day prove to be critical to sovereign interests. It’s not one industry. It’s all of them together at the same time, from building the screws to hold your phone together to the advanced chips that AI runs on.
Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.
Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.
Exports more than it imports.
Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!
An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.
Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.
I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
Hard to say what good the Trump admin is doing except exposing the rot in right wing “governance.”
Not saying these countries don't do good things too, but a lot of bad things compound when the government has to balance its books.
I couldn’t imagine a better place to live than Northern Europe, but Australia is a close second for me. Been to China, Japan, Canada, the US and I think parts of those countries are also really nice to live, just not a good match for me culturally.
Now South America is a different story. If you like good weather and a festive atmosphere it’s actually the best place to live, just don’t expect to have money or to live in a functioning state where services work!
It's impossible for every country to be a net exporter so I don't see the issue on "care about importing more than exporting", exporting high-value added products and services while importing products/services lower in the value chain is how countries that aren't so lucky as Australia with immense natural wealth and low population get to be rich as well.
Many countries in the EU also have a balanced budget, it's a mixed bag, France overruns its revenue consistently, Germany had a debt brake and until the past few years consistently had surpluses, Sweden has quite low debt and a balanced budget, the Netherlands has a small deficit, so on and so forth. So it's entirely country-dependent instead of being a general EU issue.
But living full time in China and competing with Chinese in China as a non Chinese person- that's not something you want to do.
Even countless Chinese in China don't want to do this.
Currently, even if China pulls ahead, it doesn't have to mean things getting worse in the US. Contrary to what the current government seems to believe, growth is not necessarily zero sum. Despite Americans' perception of Europe, they too remain competitive in various domains of research. Similarly with, say, Japan.
For those of us living in America and Europe this truly is shocking and earth shattering. It is the end of the world as we know it.
Most of the populist nonsense ultimately comes down to their delusion that they're being cheated out of the position they deserve as inherently superior people.
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
U.S. industry, for one, spreads to many countries through outsourcing. But China can consume outsourcing within its own borders. If that happens, what will become of it?
1. the R&D tax credit was gone from 2022 - 2025 thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed in 2017.
2. private equity does not invest in R&D
The ones really funding research are VCs, governments and founders taking bank loans.
1 China has a billion people
2 education is practically sacred in Chinese culture
It is only natural that after China's century of Western humiliation and Mao's delusional cultural revolution that the country is retaking it's rightful place.
Why wouldn’t it? Have you seen our governance?
This 2024 will be the same as the historical data shows, as China number is never right.
Upvote this in 2034 until then chinese will downvote the crap outta my comment.
There have been other errors along the way, such as the Bayh-Doyle Act [1], a law signed by Jimmy Carter in a lame duck session after losing to Ronald Reagan to essentially give away NIH research. I'm a firm believer that federal research dollars should come with equity strings attached in the results. Otherwise, fund your own research. And in pharmaceuticals, it's basically all federal research, despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't. Actually there's one thing it does invest in: patent extension.
Also, we've addicted to fossil fuels, IMHO because it induces demand for weapons.
One big difference between the US and China is that China has significant capital controls so China has a captive market of over $100T in household savings that has to be invested in something and it can't just leave. This too creates problems but the gains in China and decrease in costs cannot be dismissed easily. Also, China has basically managed to recreate all the technologies the US has tried to restrict from being exported to China, everything from welding large container ships to the latest and greatest lithography and manufacturing.
But housing absolutely needs to stop being an investment. It's a huge reason why the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out in the West.
[1]: https://issues.org/bayh-dole-innovation-policy-woodson/
All of this is actually bound to happen, and it is laid out clearly in China's Five-Year Plans. Industrial upgrading is something China is bound to do, and it is bound to succeed—a colossal nation built on Confucian moral values with science as its religion.
Of course, if we ask the classic "but at what cost," it's that wealth distribution in these emerging high-tech industries is deeply unequal. Being right in the middle of it, every day I see two extremes: some company is hiring AI interns for 5,000 yuan a day, or offering PhD graduates an annual salary of 1 million yuan! Yet at the same time, massive numbers of people are unemployed, and countless others are living on baseline minimum wages.
If China truly wants to become a socialist country, beyond technological progress, it must properly resolve the inequality issues brought about by the reform and opening-up.