The problems of the USA

Jeff John Roberts in Famous judge spikes Apple-Google case, calls patent system “dysfunctional” looks at an interim judgement on a patent case by U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner. I'm not going to go into the case (although I find it interesting because I think that the US patent system is broken). The reason I have posted about this article is because Roberts quotes a blog post by the good judge on the "declining strength of American institutions". I think this one paragraph that I have quoted below is as concise a description of many of the problems the USA has as you can get. The original source of the blog post that Roberts quotes from is here.

The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions. Our capitalist system needs a lot of work to achieve proper capitalist goals.