Political Chips
Full disclosure: I worked for AMD for about a decade.<p>I agree with the bottom line here (we should spend gov't $$ to make sure significant amounts of chip manufacturing still get made in the US, and Intel has to be a big part of that).  However, it misses the real reason for Intel's decline.<p>For most of it's existence, if Intel had missed a manufacturing node in Moore's Law, it would have been rightly recognized as an existential threat, and it would have become the #1 focus of the CEO and the rest of the company.  Intel fell behind Moore's Law for years in its manufacturing, and it never caused them to appropriately panic until that hit the bottom line.  This is a problem of an executive suite too focused on this quarter's results, and not focused enough on the engineering that drives those results.  Previous generations of Intel executives understood that.  It is likely that the current CEO, brought in once the board saw problems in their stock price, realizes it.  If they had been run by executives who cared more about the underlying engineering, they would have had a 5-year head start in fixing the situation.