I'm in my 40s and old enough to remember when the government ran just fine (before the national debt grew to $3 trillion in the 80s). We grew up wanting to go to Space Camp, and build human-powered airplanes, and hack into our school to change our grades. There was none of this dour doom and gloom about government overeach we have today. Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club demonstrated that our biggest problems were finding dates and getting into college, not worrying which constitutional freedom the government was going to take away next.

IMHO the problem happened when the propaganda machine began telling us that the government is the enemy and can't do anything right:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA

I know that many people still believe that today, but they are wrong. My personal evidence for this is the fact that our education, infrastructure, and social safety net were all much stronger in the 80s than today. The catch is, that they weren't strong for everyone. Women and minorities were largely left out. The 80s were mostly about the growing pains of transitioning from a 1950's style nuclear family economy to a 21st century one where every human being has equal dignity. That scared a lot of people, and resulted in AIDS and the war on drugs, among a great many other social ills that never.should.have.happened.

The scientific evidence for the lack of justice and progress in 40 years is the vast wealth inequality today. We're what, 2, 4, 10 times more productive per capita than in 1980? But make less money adjusted for inflation? Someone stole that money. And they did it politically. The catch there is that politicans are the symptom of dysfunction, not the cause.

With all that out of the way, I think we can still have a vision forward. I think that to get the USA back towards the top, we need to address every ranking where we currently suffer: education, healthcare, infant mortality, college/personal/national debt, environmental sustainability, being overworked/underpaid, lack of transparency in government, on and on. We know the problems, but our two major political parties have us deadlocked and distracted so they can skim from us to line their own pockets and those of their donors in order to maintain artificial scarcity and rent seeking to bolster hierarchy.

Politics aside, there is a huge, untapped, public sector market that has been starving for capital since 1967. There was a long term agenda to convert that to a private sector market by means such as HMOs, the privatization of education, and buildup of the military industrial complex without an industrial superpower threatening us.

Personally I'd like to see money be shifted from those things back to the public sector (We the People), but that's unlikely to happen because our economy is made up of the middlemen it feeds now. Luckily with our increased productivity, we can find a way to feed everyone.

Government is traditionally good at long term investment. So it's going to be a shift for any private sector startup to go from short term thinking to long term planning. But for example, there is nearly infinite opportunity in things like the Green New Deal, distrupting the ISP duopolies, bringing the arts and humanities back into education, big data/machine learning in medicine, new forms of transportation, organizing labor/guilds, peace corps and legal financial instruments to provide people the means to work off and/or settle their debts, and so on. These are comparable to the federal budget, perhaps $1-4 trillion annually in untapped opportunities.