And it might even work, but only ever on paper. The U.S. economy is nearly entirely built around moving money at this point. One third of the U.S. GDP is a result of the private healthcare system. As China bolsters its manufacturing instead of abandoning it, continuing to create high quality, high tech jobs in the field, the United States tries to appear competitive in terms of GDP.

This Red Lobster example so perfectly encapsulates the state of consolidation that late capitalism in the United States has entered. Any recorded profits by the hedge fund that bought out Red Lobster were partially because it chose to vamipirically suck value out of every real and tangible thing that actually took decades of infrastructure, labor, and business integration to build. It’s very analogous to soil degraded from too much intensive agriculture, so the farmer has to constantly cut down new forests to harvest crops. Each new patch of forest cut down for extremely temporary intensive agriculture (read: short term economic gain) is the parasitic bourgeoisie leeching the real, tangible societal value of things like Red Lobster away from the masses.

Eventually the owning class was going to have to begin removing jenga blocks from the bottom of the tower to have more at the top, and we are watching said tower become unstable just like every Marxist economist in history said it would. The mode of working class exploitation has already deeply expanded from labor exploitation just 60 years ago, to EXPECTED and increasing indebtedness as soon as adulthood is reached.

America will never ACTUALLY compete with China in this state. America makes nothing, and given examples like Red Lobster here, where we see the systematic dismantling of tangible things which took decades to build, America arguably makes less than nothing. It has been reduced to a capital scrap yard.