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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.
- CommentaryHousing Supply
Federal policy cannot raise housing supply and should pay for authorisations instead
Idaho authorised 0.98 new private housing units per thousand residents in July 2026 and California 0.21, a ratio of 4.66, under the same federal tax code and the same policy rate. Idaho's house-price index has still multiplied 8.78 times since 1980 against California's 9.75, so authorising more has not by itself held appreciation down.
- CommentaryWorkforce & Skills
Administrative capacity should be counted in decisions per qualified head, not in the occupational group that carries its name
Office and Administrative Support is the largest occupational group in the country, 17,753,410 jobs of a 51-state total of 155,495,750. The District of Columbia, where administration is the industry, ranks last of the 51 on it, at 76.871 such jobs per thousand against Tennessee's 129.94.
- 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
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.
- 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
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.
- CommentaryRegional Development
Six states raise no income tax and no two replace it the same way
Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming levy no individual income tax. The FY2025 collections file shows what each one leans on instead, and the answer is narrower and less uniform than the shorthand suggests.