With no universal healthcare, no free higher education, very little social safety net and a raft of other holes in society to fall through, America is the poster child of “F$$k everyone else, I got mine”
Lack of adequate STEM education in US schools --> more liberal arts majors --> more MBAs --> low value for engineering fundamentals and higher value for financialization --> Oh crap, MBAs can't send stuff to space?
There are an enormous number of physicists who can't find jobs now, the systemic problems are much deeper than that. In fact, I would posit that the "low standards" of highschool STEM relative to countries like India are actually due to the extraordinarily high fraction of our kids we push in that direction.