What do you think the US does well?

[Rockefeller GOP]

Some of this stuff can be framed any way you want it to be.  For example, should we be penalized because we encourage everyone to go to school and in fact offer free education until college, which causes our cumulative test scores to be worse than some countries who separate university and trade school kids at an early age?  I don't think so.  We'd have comparable scores if we only tested our top students, too.

As the awesome post above mind illustrates, it's the intangible things that makes America great.  Our spirit of innovation, our perseverance, our creativity, etc.  Whenever you have a diverse country of over 300 million, you're going to have poor/fat/uneducated/*insert undesirable trait here* pockets that drag down the average ... but the "best" of America can compete with the best of any nation on Earth; it has been that way for a long time, and it likely will be for a long time.