One of the reasons the U.S. is becoming less competitive globally is because we are becoming weaker economically. I know the whole world has had economic problems over the pass couple years, but China and India are back on track again while we are still wallowing in increasing debt and over-spending.
Our economic problems are not temporary. We have major looming issues primarily resulting from the ridiculous debt levels which is further fueled by unnecessary over-spending by the Govt. Some of the looming issues I see are massive underfunding of Social Security and Medicare, underfunded Govt pensions, taxes are rising (and going to rise much more), inflation has occurred already (trillions of new dollars printed backed by nothing tangible) and dramatic rising prices are inevitable, interest rates will be raised to fight inflation which means the interest on Govt debt will be rising as well. Furthermore, the U.S. is becoming less competitive "pricewise" in the global marketplace for 2 reasons: (1) salary demands are higher than most of the rest of the world (we don't want to change that one ;-) , and (2) the value of the dollar (relative to other currencies) is declining.
One form of excessive spending I can't even figure out "why" we're doing it is we give away billions of dollars every year to other countries ... Why can't we just stop doing that (at least in most cases) for a couple of years or until we get our debt under control?
