Japan has done well as did Germany after WWII. At some point you have to cut them loose and let them do the right thing..Mexico is top 20 in natural resources yet still super poor..it starts at the top imo.
Neither were colonized and faced the peculiar challenges a lot of Latin America or the Middle East face. It's not a judgment, it's just a simple statement of fact. Same as when assessing the causes of migration from those regions I mentioned. Part of the reason they are less economically developed is because of the kind of leaders and economies the US encouraged and at time forced upon them.
And yeah, resource rich countries tend to develop poorly, particularly ones with larger populations. Or to be more specific, resources encourage rentier governments who pilfer the country or neglect long term development.
When I say housing is finite I of course am referring to the limitations on the rate at which homes can be built, the strain on infrastructure caused by more housing and building, and the limited amount of land on which it can be built. Neglecting these considerations leads us to a real estate developers dictatorship where more and more 300 Sq ft boxes are built higher and higher into the sky to cram more and more people into.
Building housing is a matter of months or a few years, it's the actual zoning and permitting process that takes a lot of time. There's no economic or structural reason we have the housing shortage we due, it's purely artificial. We pick policies that reduce the supply of housing and homeowners tend to lobby against more housing because it devalues (at least relatively) the value of their own house long term.
There's not really a limit on land or infrastructure. Plenty of land (even if just looking at changing zooming to multifamily) and infrastructure can be expanded.
America can ease its growing pains by growing slower. It's a simple matter of supply and demand where the importance of neither can be neglected.
It cannot grow that much slower for several obvious reasons:
-Americans do not want to pay more for housing and groceries, which means you need migrants willing to work at wages that natives aren't willing to work out. It's the ugly truth of how America has outperformed other countries, access to cheaper labor, whether slavery, legal migrants, illegal migrants, etc.
-Social safety nets: Excepting immigrants, America has far more people exiting the workforce than entering it. That means the calculus for benefits is going the wrong way, and either Americans have to pay more into social safety nets or you cut benefits for old people.
-Workforce shortages: We're pretty much at full employments, and we still have shortages in a wide variety of jobs, from low skilled to high skilled. Surely it hasn't been lost on you that part of the reason's for Silicon's Valley's dominance and American supremacy in tech is H1B and immigrants in general, no?
So will less leeching be enough to make the difference?
Immigrant pay more into government coffers and the economy than they get back in spending.