It’s shocking really how wasteful the leaders of the United States can be.
We haven't had any big changes for a very long time. People want change. They felt Trump was the change candidate, so they tried him.
Obama did the ACA, which was a compromise with Republicans by implementing the Republican plan, that was the most recent substantial change I can thing of, but it doesn't actually fix anything fundamental (and Republicans are forever at a loss about how to fix healthcare, because their plan was already implemented by Obama, so they can't actually say anything good about their own plan).
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.
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.
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.
Your #2 "not as healthy fiscally" is itself an oligarch narrative. Spending money to invest for the future is a sensible thing to do, and the US has the world reserve currency so we don't even need to borrow to do that but rather can make new money as long as others believe we will have a good future. But every time this fake austerity narrative gains a foothold, it's used to destroy spending that had been investing in the future (with jobs/incomes that were going into the distributed economy!), while actually creating even more monetary inflation than there had been - but it goes right into the oligarch's pockets! In order for your argument to be true, voters would have to actually punish politicians for wasteful spending. Given that Republicans specifically have been running this fake austerity scam for decades and getting away with it, it is clear voters do not. What voters actually seem to respond to is feel-good propaganda, which is exactly what the fake austerity narrative is.
Meanwhile the whole point of "clean energy" in this context is that it's a widespread distributed project that creates real jobs that produce tangible useful assets. Much better than the oligarchs' preference for fake make-work jobs like that whole healthcare denial industry.
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.
I get the urge to find someone to blame. It's not the fault of the voter, because that would imply personal accountability. Or at the very least, it would imply a lot about the underlying character of chunk of the population.
On the other hand, you can't blame the media for gas price reports. Or the cost of housing. Or the people dying of measles. Or the men in masks rounding up people. The voter can see all that themselves.
The voter knows about the current conflict with Iran. That is not a "media bias". They are free to decide themselves if that is justified.
The voter who spends all day on Fox news is welcome to decide for themselves if they want a hand-out of cash promised for after the the election. (A promise they've heard before, but not seen).
So yeah, it eould be nice to blame the oligarchs, or the media, or China, or the church, or pretty much anyone, as long as that anyone is not the voter who can see what is happening, and votes for more of the same.
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?
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)
Also copays and high deductibles. People can end up footing 20 to 50% of their medical bills (out of pocket).
- 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.
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.
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 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.
What does the stock market have to do with anything?
Besides, the Chinese st9ck market has been atrocious since.... pretty much forever. You'd think they still live in mud pools if you think the stock market is representative of overall development.
Most wealth in China are calculated from real estate which doesn't generate any economic activity on it's own and they build more houses than they will live in. Most US wealth are actually from real corporation flow.
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.
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.