It amazes me how people fail to see their own Luddite-ism. Look, here's the deal: The Luddites protested the mechanization of the textile industry during the industrial revolution. Their reasoning was that if one person maintaining one machine could do the same work as 100 individual laborers, then that would mean 99 people out of work. It turns out, what businesses actually did was keep all 100 workers employed and instead turned out 100 times the product.
The U.S. (and the rest of the developed world) is only in trouble if we cannot continue to grow our economy exponentially (and keep in mind that an exponential increase in efficiency or an exponential decrease in material costs is just as good as an exponential increase in gross product). What really _kills_ me, though, is that the very thing that we need to achieve sustained growth is the very same thing that people are trying to cut out: funding for science and technology research.
Every time I hear some Republican's campaign add talk about: "Can you believe we spend money digging up dinosaur bones in China? Shouldn't we spend that money at home?", I die a little inside. If China overtakes the U.S. as a world power, it will be due, in part, to the rapid increase in Ph.D.s and research funding that they are currently undertaking.
In the history of the world, there has never been a time when the most powerful nation was not also the most technologically advanced.