The grandparent mentioned debt, but the U.S. spends over a trillion every year in defense spending, which doesn't include other funding and tax breaks. Nearly every major technological innovation and thus corporations that use those have been born out of government defense research. Even entire universities, such as MIT, were created for this reason.

Chomsky has argued this, that we dump public funds into entities that end up being completely private. This is even worse than what happens in China. Because the government loses the return in investment and ends up being "purchased" by these corporations and their ilk. It's really a sick system.