Want to kickstart a century of unparalleled innovation and entrepreneurship in the US?

Simple. But you have to cleanup the mess first.

In other words, throw out all that is mismanaged, inefficient and abused and replace it with an infrastructure fine-tuned to iterate to optimize growth and innovation.

This means making changes to government, workforce and taxation.

Here's my (incomplete) list:

  - Pass a constitutional amendment that requires our
    government to operate under a balanced budget

  - Establish a maximum cost of government as a percent of
    GDP (or some other metric) in order to prevent a grab
    for more tax revenue to expand government and the 
    pervasive always-spend-more culture

  - Reduce government to a bare minimum

  - Completely phase out all entitlement programs

  - Institute new --smaller-- programs to help those who
    really need them.

  - All businesses contribute a small percentage of gross
    to this program (1%?).  The idea is to setup a system
    where government will have reason to work towards 
    improving business activity in order to fund programs.
    Today they reach for optimizing tax revenues as 
    opposed to optimizing economic activity which is far
    more important.

  - Make unions illegal for government workers.
    It's a huge conflict of interest: Government workers
    benefit from laws and the workings of government and
    form a unified voting block that is self-serving.

  - No lifetime pensions for anyone working in government.
    I'd go as far as making them illegal for anyone, period.
    There is no sensible mathematical formula that supports
    the idea of lifetime pensions.  A person and their family
    ought to be responsible for their own retirement without
    becoming a burden for the rest of society for generations
    to come.
    These are business killers.

  - Fire everyone at the patent office

  - Create a new patent and trademark system who's priority
    is to optimize to maximize innovation while
    providing reasonable protections for work that requires
    massive R&D

  - Flat and low taxes

  - No deductions for anyone

  - Businesses pay zero taxes

  - Businesses contribute 5% of their gross to a national
    R&D fund

  - The fund is NOT accessible to anyone in government

  - The fund is administered by a team of CEO's from various
    industries.  There could be other layers too.  The main
    point is:  No government claws can reach this fund.

  - The fund's goal is to provide financial support, legal
    and operational guidance to entrepreneurs.  Call it a
    mega-incubator