>It is also notable that Chinese competitiveness has only increased as they have engaged in decades of state economic planning and market barriers.

Meanwhile in California, the high-speed rail project is not going so well. There's some serious problems in the U.S bureaucracy, especially blue states. A recent extension of a rail line in San Francisco came in at $1 billion per mile. There are huge amounts of people dependent on the government running inefficiently, vastly overpaying and taking as long as possible to complete work. As we've seen with DOGE, as soon as someone starts to dig into all that, the whole establishment dependent on that inefficiency screams bloody murder. They seem to be adept at developing flywheels where the more money they spend, the worse the problems get, and that justifies spending more money. The $300 million a year homeless budget in San Francisco is a great example of that tendency. Somehow, that needs to get fixed if we want to compete at a world standard level.