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- PerspectivesEnergy & Power
The stages of an energy transition that have to come first are the ones the national record does not count
The ten-year Treasury yield rose from 0.89 percent in 2020 to 4.29 in 2025 while crude ran from 39 dollars a barrel to 95 and back to 65, so both terms of a transition's first calculation moved in every year the plant was going up. The record that counts plant and vehicles closely does not count generation, transmission or interconnection at all.
- PerspectivesInfrastructure
The boundary of a public investment appraisal is drawn where the measurement stops
The capital cost in a public investment appraisal has a published national counterpart, nonresidential construction spending at 1309 billion dollars a year; the benefit stream it is weighed against has none. The discount rate decides the rest: at 4.29 percent a dollar arriving in year thirty is worth 28.4 cents, and at the 0.89 percent of 2020 it was worth 76.7 cents.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
Public capital is allocated by the form of the claim, and the only contest the statistics show is inside one construction total
Spending on manufacturing plant went from 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024 and 215 in 2025, while housing units authorised by permit ended the window 48 thousand below where they began. Neither total separates public money from private, and nothing in the record decomposes the federal balance into the claims that competed for it.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
Public purchasing is an industrial instrument, and none of these series counts it as one
A government's order book transfers demand risk in a way a grant cannot, which is the reason it would work as industrial policy. What complicates the case is that the spending which is counted rose steeply, plant construction going from 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024, and manufacturing output is still below its 2017 base.
- PerspectivesInfrastructure
An infrastructure delivery model allocates risk, capital and blame, and it reduces none of the three
A delivery model is a contract about where the risk, the capital and the accountability sit, and only two of those can be priced and sold. The ten-year yield moved 3.4 points in five years while the record of what was built stayed one undifferentiated line, so the comparison between models is one the public record cannot check.
- PerspectivesWorkforce & Skills
The states that make the most things are not the states with the most engineers
Of the eight states where production work is most concentrated, four hold less than the national share of architecture and engineering jobs and two more hold barely the national share. That gap, not the incentive package, is the binding constraint on where a complex facility can be built and run.
- PerspectivesInfrastructure
Shovel-ready is a wage question before it is a permitting one
Texas and California employ almost exactly the same number of construction and extraction workers. The median wage in one is 49,170 dollars and in the other 71,670. A national cost per mile that ignores that is not a cost estimate.
- PerspectivesFiscal Policy
Ohio levies a corporate income tax and collected 176 thousand dollars from it
In the FY2025 collections file the corporate income tax runs from 32.9 percent of New Hampshire's state taxes to effectively nothing in Ohio, and four states have no such levy at all. The share is a poor guide to how a state treats capital, and it is used as a good one.