[wakawaka28]

The US government still makes demands and subsidizes whatever it wants. It's not a problem with super rich, unless you mean super rich politicians and executives that sell the country out. We are falling behind mainly because everything is outsourced and the US holds a small fraction of the world's population anyway.

[phmqk76]

I feel like you didn’t understand my comment in the historical content in which I intended it. Government spending is directly responsible for huge technological leaps in the 20th century, and not today. Obama’s stimulus act funded loans to clean energy companies and was pilloried when bets failed. The country that I grew up in tossed billions into cool shit and nobody ever said boo about it, and we ended up world leaders for decades. The Chinese are doing that now, while we dicker around.

[wakawaka28]

The country you grew up in was rich from the spoils of war as other countries had to rebuild everything. It's not merely because of spending that we were world leaders. We had the biggest manufacturing base in the world, and not so much debt. Now the situation is opposite. We have an epic amount of ever-expanding debt, plus most of our manufacturing has been outsourced. What we're left with is a country with 5% of the world's population and one with little capacity for self-sufficiency. Can spending more help us become leaders in something? It could happen. But look at the competition, look at the degredation in our capabilities, even the degredation in our culture. Most of the wealth in our world comes from natural resources and manufacturing, and our manufacturing is about the most expensive in the world.

>Obama’s stimulus act funded loans to clean energy companies and was pilloried when bets failed.

When the results don't match the investment, it is natural to cut back. Keep in mind Obama also presided over the global financial crisis of 2008, and the government had a number of urgent things to take care of. Incentives for clean energy never stopped, and in the case of EVs they are becoming annoying. We don't need an EV mandate. If they want people to use EVs, they need to make EVs that don't suck. That seems to be a lot to ask for, and the tech just isn't ready.