CommentaryInsightsPerspectivesExplainers
Place
World
163 pieces
Pieces
- ExplainerRegional Development
How a tax-increment financing district works
A TIF district pays for public works out of the tax growth those works are meant to cause. By the end you will know what the district captures, who gives it up, and what the argument between supporters and critics is actually about.
- 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.
- InsightsMacroeconomics & Markets
The deficit widened most in the year the debt ratio was lowest
Into 2023 the deficit widened by 313 billion dollars, the largest single-year widening in the window, and federal debt that year stood at 117.7 per cent of GDP, the lowest of its own six readings. Across the five year-on-year moves the two series ran in the same direction three times and in opposite directions twice.
- 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.
- CommentaryIndustrial Policy
The bigger GDP number answers a different question
The United States publishes two gross domestic product totals and they are diverging by design. Industrial programmes are almost always defended with the larger one, which is the only one that cannot tell you whether more is being made.
- InsightsMacroeconomics & Markets
The dollar index gained 7.6 points in one year and 2.0 in the three that followed
The broad index fell to 113.1 in 2021, rose to 120.7 in 2022, and has since read 120.3, 122.9 and 122.7. Each annual point is the average of that year's observations, so a flat line between two years does not establish a quiet year inside either of them.
- InsightsIndustrial Policy
Manufacturing output has been below its 2017 level in every year since 2020
The manufacturing index read 93 on a 2017 base of 100 in 2020 and 97.3 in 2025, with a high of 98 in 2022. Total industrial production, on the same base and from the same board, crossed 100 in 2022 and has stayed above it, and the distance between the two lines has widened at every step since 2021.
- InsightsWorkforce & Skills
The states most crowded with construction workers are mostly drilling and mining
Ranked by construction and extraction jobs per thousand, the top of the table is Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico and Alaska. Their own occupational detail shows what is doing the work in that ranking, and it is not building.
- ExplainerIndustrial Policy
How construction spending counts work that has actually been done
Announcements, permits and starts all measure intent. Value put in place measures work installed on site. This explains what the difference is worth when a building programme is being judged.
- InsightsIndustrial Policy
Half the capacity use gained after 2020 has since been given back
Manufacturing capacity utilisation rose 4.7 points between 2020 and 2022, and 4.4 of them arrived in the first year. It has given back 2.3 points in the three years since.
- InsightsEconomic Security
The consumer price index has not fallen in a single year since 2020
Prices rose more slowly after 2022, and the index kept rising anyway. It stands at 322 against 258.9 five years earlier, a level about 24 percent higher.
- CommentaryStrategic Technology
An export control can close a sale and it cannot close a dependency
Goods imports from China averaged 45 billion dollars a month in 2022 and 26 billion a month in 2025, and goods exports to mainland China fell to 9 billion a month, the lowest of six readings. Over the same years the balance in goods and services widened from minus 75 billion a month to minus 78, the widest of its own six.
- 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.
- CommentaryIndustrial Policy
One industrial line is climbing and the index around it is not
Domestic semiconductor production reached 165 on a 2017 base in 2025, from 121 in 2021. Total industrial production reached 101.2. That gap is the best evidence economic-security policy has in this data, which is exactly why it should be claimed carefully.
- CommentaryTrade & Investment
Trade policy built for containers is missing a trillion dollars of exports
Services exports run at $1.2 trillion on the Bureau of Economic Analysis measure. Tariff schedules, rules of origin and customs lines cannot see them, which means neither the protection nor the retaliation lands where a growing part of the exposure sits.
- InsightsEconomic Security
Real output per person rose again in 2025, by less than in any earlier year of the window
Output per person has risen at every reading, from 61,127 chained 2017 dollars in 2020 to 69,749 in 2025, but the step into 2025 is 1,068 dollars and it is the smallest of the five. The total the figure is drawn from slowed in the same year, adding 0.49 trillion dollars against 0.64 in each of the two years before it, so the flatter step is not a story about population alone.
- 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.
- 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.
- ExplainerEconomic Security
What a government means when it says de-risking
De-risking is the attempt to remove one supplier's leverage over an economy without ending the trade. By the end you should know which instruments governments use, why dependence is so hard to measure, and why rising domestic output does not settle the question.
- 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.