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.
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?
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!
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.
Hard to say what good the Trump admin is doing except exposing the rot in right wing “governance.”
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.
China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.
Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.
Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.
The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.
A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.
Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.
This just isn't true. There's a K visa for young STEM professionals, which is about a year old. It's a bit more flexible for this very narrow group, otherwise you need a Z visa and work permit. You need a job first before the provincial labor authorities will approve a work permit. There's a points system, salary requirements and age cap.
There's no practical path to permanent residence in China. The Chinese "green card" equivalent has been issued to under 15,000 people since 2004. Even under Trump, the US issues about 10x more green cards in a single year than China has in two decades.
The numbers don't lie: in a country of over a billion people, there are well under 1 million foreign workers. There's a massive problem with youth underemployment and unemployment and net migration has been negative for 75+ years.
They love money so much, you could swear they're American!
US was arguably the most open country on the planet in terms of acceptance of ideas and cultural diversity especially in 20th century.
But I also don't think people need to be very worried but still we haven't had monocultures on the top or close to the top of power hierarchy for several decades so it's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
For instance China is heavily censorious of LGBTQ and very likely against the Idea they haven't banned it outright yet thankfully. But then again lots of countries are in a similar boat.
But the biggest difference is China can easily back slide without possiblity of return on any metric because it's not a democracy.
I had lots of friends when I lived in Beijing who were gay, the gay bars weren’t underground and my gay coworkers weren’t in the closest, for L/girls it was even more out in the open (especially at the art schools). If you haven’t lived in China I guess you wouldn’t have a clue.
Again it's hard to say where it's open or where it's closed, they seem to be back sliding in very weird ways. I am not part of the LGBTQ community so I can't say for certain how bad it is, so I won't comment further but UN & human rights watch has been citing increasing censoring of LGBT representation and open-ness in China in recent times.
The biggest concern with China is lack of democratic freedom means as long as it's not bad enough to revolt the country can back slide pretty easily on many metrics with complete silence, no protests etc.
[1]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/25/china-social-media-films...
American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.
*Edit it's a typo. You meant big.
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.
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 apparently 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, hence why I said in my previous post that this stuff was given away. It didn't need to be stolen.
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.
> 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 "Total CPB Enforcemnt Actions" yearly numbers for inadmissibles, expulsions and apprehensions (as per the footnotes). 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?
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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).
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
private funds until the bubble pops, then it becomes public funds for the bailout.
same as 2008.
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.
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/
That's the first time I've heard this. Can you elaborate? How do they produce new drugs without heavy investment in research?
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.
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?
Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
He hasn’t bothered to work with a Republican Congress to pass laws. He certainly won’t bother with a Democratic or split Congress.
I'm 50, and I am thinking basically "the rest of my life" is what it will take to start fixing some of this stuff, if it's even possible.
Instead we decided to elect a bunch of people to burn it all down and speedrun the fall of Rome.
We'll still be a world power at the end of it--in the same way France and England are world powers.
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.