How can that be prevented or mitigated within something like the American political framework?

You'd need a revolution or an economic collapse to happen first to trigger an absolutely massive amount of introspection among their class. I doubt revolution is viable at the current moment in time with the size of and loyalty that the american military has to the american civil religion and see no likelihood of it becoming viable in the near future so economic collapse is likely the only possibility. Two things will happen as a result of it, the military around the world will have to be reined in because it simply won't be able to continue to afford it while also keeping the population in check, and also the bourgeoisie will get a scare from it occurring and have to ask themselves whether they want to continue to risk their existence in the global headquarters of capitalism. This would likely trigger new interest among them for a New Deal similar to the one Roosevelt implemented, which contrary to what americans think about him and other bougies of his time being "nice" it was actually implemented for the same reasons - stopping the threat of a working class revolution from occurring.

It might sound odd that an economic collapse would need to happen (which would make the country poorer) before seeing the ruling class implement better standards of living, welfare and protections. But it makes sense when you realise that these things are implemented not because the ruling class are nice but because they are threatened. Revolution is and always has been the primary threat that the working class can use to extort compromise from the ruling class. As we saw with Bernie, they are unwilling at the current point in time to allow it to go ahead, anyone that watched the democrats all conspire together to ratfuck him out of the race saw that.

This of course wouldn't fix capitalism. It would just make the poor live a little better and rein in some of the worst excesses of their class in society for the sake of maintaining their rule.

Is economic collapse likely or possible? Not right now. The american dollar being the world's global reserve currency allows them to print infinite amounts of money to prop up the system whenever it's under strain. Dedollarisation is underway worldwide as an effort to remove that ability from their toolkit, when a financial crisis hits and they no longer have that ability then such a collapse is quite likely, this of course depends on when the next 2008 happens but you can count on those occurring every 10-20 years or so because it's capitalism and the boom/bust is never ending.