faced with staunch refusals to consider any type of revolutionary building at the institutional level, would-be builders reduced their hopes to incremental changes, bringing us to the current state of affairs.
after enormous legislative efforts, incremental and generally insufficient changes are made to support the strength of US institutions. then, as part of the dealmaking necessary to make any changes whatsoever, other institutions are degraded incrementally in trade. the system of the country's institutions never becomes stronger in terms of its total sum of capabilities, it only reshuffles them.
imagine trying to build a house when half of your building team never lets you purchase any new materials, only permitting you the use of bricks that are already built into the house. you have to remove a brick from the foundation to place it on the top of a half-constructed wall. that's the situation the US is in. it's untenable.
there isn't going to be a tidy legislative solution to this kind of intractability anytime soon because the people with the most money prefer the current situation and fund politicians accordingly.
lest you think that the point of my comment is to blame republicans or democrats, let me tell you that it isn't. my point is that america cannot build because it cannot accept that building requires spending, as spending would require contradicting the will of the political donor class. we needed to get money out of politics back when occupy wall street was calling for it. the next best time is now.
in a nutshell, the rich need to do their part to contribute to society and accept that their influence must be curbed if the country is to flourish once again. as we know, there's no chance of them doing this of their own accord. i'll leave the details of how we can get them on board with rebuilding the country to the imagination of the reader.