We know that massive investment in early education with tutoring etc. could easily give the average US child the equivalent of today's top 2% level academic performance. This would be expensive, but essentially unproblematic it will never happen. Similarly, university education could be made publicly funded, and also cheaper. Here in Sweden it's cheaper per head than highschool education.
We know that physician labour in the US cost more than it should due to a shortage due to too few residencies. It could be solved tomorrow, and all US medical system problems could be solved over 15-20 years.
You could ensure that there's investment capital and no inflation, sidestepping the simultaneous inflation and need for investment caused by supply shocks due to war and technology change, by making everybody save a certain inflation-dependent fraction of their income from wages.
When a company is doing weird legal stuff to prevent their competitor from opening a warehouse in a certain, crush them-- impose criminal penalties, throw the planners and everyone who knew about the idea in jail.
15 years of this and you'd be in another world, one in which China might not be such a competitor after all. The only reason you aren't moving towards this world is because 'you' in the sense of the donors and the political leadership don't want to do it. There's even people who don't want publicly funded school lunches. With this attitude one makes oneself irrelevant.
If you want to build it you need capital and a large mass of competent people. China has 4x your population, so if you are to do that match them in the number of people who can come up with a concept for a factory and implement it.
You have no chance without transforming your society. You can't match them and have all this inefficient industry with middle-men and insurance companies, local hospital monopolies, local food monopolies, etc. If you are to have any chance all of that has to go away. You can't have people doing things that don't matter, you have to educate everyone you have, from the earliest education to the later stages to get them to a much higher level of capability than they are at today. You can't waste people on being hungry or not having a tutor.
If you are wasting people on being hungry, not having a tutor, in inefficient middle-men industries, etc. the China will simply steamroll you by being as many as you and us Europeans together even after a population halving and by maintaining their current competence level.