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- CommentaryIndustrial Policy
Announced investment is not a statistic and industrial policy should stop being scored on it
Construction spending on manufacturing plant rose from an annual rate of 82 billion dollars in 2021 to 215 billion in 2025, while the manufacturing output index moved from 97.6 to 97.3 on a 2017 base of 100. Lag complicates the comparison: a plant paid for in 2024 reaches an output index years later, which argues for waiting rather than scoring the policy on its announcements.
- CommentaryEnvironmental Permitting
Whether permitting is slow can only be answered by counting the applications still waiting
Housing units authorised by permit fell from an annual rate of 1734 thousand units in 2021 to 1431 in 2025, a drop of 303. That series counts decisions leaving the permitting system and never the applications sitting inside it, and a count of departures is consistent with any waiting time at all.
- CommentaryWorkforce & Skills
The binding constraint on American port throughput sits inland, not at the berth
The occupational file puts the three heaviest concentrations of transport and material-moving work in Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana, none of which fronts an ocean, and puts California, Florida and New York below the national share. No series held here counts a container, a berth or a crane, so the inland reading is an inference from where the work is counted.
- CommentaryWorkforce & Skills
Defence capacity is a tooling and workforce problem procurement reform does not reach
Construction spending on manufacturing plant ran at an annual rate of 125 billion dollars in 2022 and 244 billion in 2024, while core capital-goods orders held at a monthly average of 77 billion in 2022 and 77 again in 2025. This site holds no defence series at all, so the argument runs through the civilian base defence buys from.
- CommentaryEnergy & Power
Interconnection queues are a pricing failure, and faster studies will not clear them
The charge a project faces for connecting to the grid cannot be known when the decision to build is made, because it depends on which other applications are studied first, and a charge settled that way is a draw rather than a price. No series in this brief measures a queue, so the case rests on mechanism and on what the priced parts of the system already show.
- CommentaryInfrastructure
The permit counts say permitting is not the binding constraint on American delivery
Housing units authorised by permit fell in each of the four years to 2025, from an annual rate of 1734 thousand units to 1431, while spending on manufacturing plant rose from an annual rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024. Neither series records a waiting time, so neither can show a queue; plant spending fell 29 billion in 2025, the year the policy rate came down.
- CommentaryDevelopment Finance
Adaptation keeps losing to mitigation because an avoided loss is not a cash flow
The ten-year Treasury averaged 0.89 percent in 2020 and 4.29 percent in 2025, and at those rates a dollar of avoided damage arriving in thirty years is worth 76.7 cents and 28.4 cents. Turning that dollar into a cash flow needs a named obligor, and the party that funds a defence is rarely the party whose balance sheet it repairs.
- CommentaryEnergy & Power
Every infrastructure plan assumes a maintenance workforce it never budgets
Adding up the 51 state estimates gives 6,086,200 people in installation, maintenance and repair. In 50 of those 51 jurisdictions they are paid above the state median wage. A capital programme that treats them as someone else's problem is buying an asset it has not costed to run.
- CommentaryRural Economies
Rural broadband went wrong at handover, not at appropriation, and the agency that signed the award should carry the account
The money bought construction, and construction is not a connection: a rural household needs a line that works, at a price it will pay, kept working after the crews have gone. No series in this brief measures a broadband award, so the case rests on mechanism and on what the wage and price data show about the interval between the money and the work.
- CommentaryInfrastructure
The ten-year Treasury has done more to infrastructure than any permit reform
In 2020 a thirty-year asset was discounted against a long rate of 0.89 percent. In 2025 the same asset is discounted against 4.29. No procedural reform on the table is worth as much as that one line, and almost nobody appraising a project talks about it.
- CommentaryInfrastructure
Local infrastructure is limited by the people who can run a project, not by the price of money
The ten-year Treasury rose from 0.89 percent in 2020 to 4.29 in 2025 and nonresidential construction spending rose alongside it, from 856 billion dollars a year to 1,309. What complicates the argument is that the only capacity measure held here counts business and financial operations workers across every industry, not the staff of any city hall.