ironically it is wasting of US resources on military hardware and costly no-win wars that plays a major role in ruining the economy of the US, just as it ruined the economy of the Soviet Union. This unwise squandering of resources, driven by greed and profiteering in the defense industry, will make it rather easy for China to catch and economically surpass the US. The Chinese economy is strengthening while the US economy is weakening. China, because of its centralized, state-controlled economy, is very unlikely to surpass the US in military expenditures. They don't have a for-profit defense industry running their government, and they have apparently learned the lessons taught by both the US and the Soviet Union.
A second factor ruining the US economy is the tremendous waste of US resources on anti terrorist activities of the Homeland Security Department. This is in spite of the fact that the chance of being a terrorist victim in the US is less than the chance of being struck by lightening, and in spite of the all too obvious fact that there is no known means of preventing terrorist attacks -- the only thing that can be done is to cause terrorists to shift there focus to other sites and kinds of attacks. Furthermore, the mere threat of a terrorist attack is sufficient to cause great harm to the US economy, as the Terrorists understood from the inception of their evil plans, but sadly the US has never caught on to, or accepted, the obvious. The irrational, fear-driven, over-expenditure of resources in the US has played directly into the hands of its enemies by allowing them to leverage the expenditure of a few hundred thousand dollars into several trillion dollars damage. As in the case of corporations using fear to drive military expenditures, they also use fear to drive over expenditure on anti-terrorist measures. No politician dare refute them. Fear is among the most effective persuaders of public opinion.
There are two things that alone could turn the US economy around, of course, and that would be to bring US military and US medical spending in line with other developed countries. But that is extremely unlikely to happen giving the corporate domination of the US Government in a curious land where corporations have the same constitutional rights as individual citizens!
Domination of corporate interests over personal private interests in the US will in all likelihood prevent the US from pulling out of its debt death-spiral, while China, with all its obvious faults, will continue to have a dynamic and growing economy. There, the rapidly growing domestic demand for goods and services, without consideration of exports, insures that that will be the case for many years to come.
China has so far escaped from woes that plague the US economy. They have both low military and medical expenditures. They have so far avoided foreign entanglements that would threaten their internal safety, such as the US faces in regards to Isreal. And consequently, they have so far avoided, at least in more recent years, wasting time and assets on irrational responses to exaggerated threats. There centralized decision process is largely immune to private corporate interests.
