And increasingly so. R&D requires excess wealth, the US has a structural deficit it cannot plug growing faster than inflation.

I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]

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

the current ai boom started here in america with private funds. china is spending government funds in a desperate attempt not to lose the race. it’s not clear that china is in the stronger position, at least yet.

The amount that the US spends on R&D is a rounding fraction of the excess of military budget compared to other nation's military budgets. And by scaring off most other countries from buying US military supplies in the future, as Trump has been doing, we will end up paying a ton more for less military hardware now.

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.