Comment by immibis

This is a logical fallacy and a red herring that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

I say "GDP doesn't matter that much" and you pivot back to how GDP isn't growing and that's a problem.

You say the future will be like the present except that China will replace the USA in the position the USA currently occupies. So what? The present is pretty good.

You say that the USSR is when the government does stuff and that's really bad. That's going to need more evidence.

Funding is a way of keeping track of the things that are done, not a way of doing things. Different economies put more or less importance on the accounting and more or less importance on the actual doing. Facts about funding cannot be conflated with facts about actual doing, especially in economies that are more likely to override the funding if they don't like the way the funding is causing doing. (That's something like what the "government fraction of GDP" is - it's the percentage of times the people didn't like the free market results and chose to override them)