Democracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....
See also: the healthcare system, and the military.
We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)
The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.
Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.
About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.
> The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.
Yeah, I wouldn't call all our military spending unproductive waste. I'm not insensitive to arguments even about building stuff we don't need simply in order to keep a particular industry healthy-enough that it's ready to expand in case of an actual, serious war. I think a good deal of it is, though, and the reason it's hard to tamp down is that it's not-so-secretly a jobs program that Republicans are willing to vote to fund (even if we'd get more out of spending the same money to have the same people build parks infrastructure or whatever).
Something like a quarter of all US healthcare spending is "low value care" which isn't justified by evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. It isn't healing people and often harms them. We have a huge problem with waste, fraud, and abuse.
