CommentaryInsightsPerspectivesExplainers
Section
National Strategy
The national agenda for American productive capacity: federal priorities, the industrial base and America 275.
68 pieces
Pieces
- CommentaryIndustrial Policy
Industrial policy is being judged by the wrong labour number
The unemployment rate says how many job-seekers found work. It says nothing about how many people are looking. For a programme meant to draw people back into work, that is the only question that matters.
- InsightsEconomic Security
Federal debt rises every year but the annual addition has no trend
The stock goes from 28.7 to 37.1 trillion dollars across five observations. The four annual additions behind that run 2.1, 1.9, 2.6 and 1.8 trillion, and the most recent is the smallest of them.
- InsightsWorkforce & Skills
The fall in unemployment was finished by 2022, and the rate has risen since
The rate dropped from 8.1 percent in 2020 to 3.7 in 2022, reached a low of 3.6 in 2023, and has risen in both readings since, to 4.3.
- CommentaryInfrastructure
Three flat years of housing starts is a result, not a pause
Starts have run at 1.42, 1.37 and 1.36 million units since 2023, below where the window opened in 2020. The dollars going into construction rose through the same period, and the dollars are what gets quoted.
- InsightsEconomic Security
The industrial index has spent six years going almost nowhere
Industrial production ended 2025 at 101.2 on a 2017 base of 100. It has moved 1.9 points in four years, and the 2025 reading sits 0.2 above 2022.
- InsightsEconomic Security
American payrolls keep growing, and each year adds less than the one before
Total nonfarm payrolls rose in every annual reading from 2020 to 2025. The size of the rise has fallen three years running, from 6.2 million jobs to 700,000.
- InsightsEconomic Security
Retail sales rose in every year of the window, counted in dollars
The monthly rate went from 601.2 billion dollars in 2021 to 724.4 in 2025 with no down year. The largest single-year rise landed in the same year as the largest rise in the price level.
- CommentaryEconomic Security
An economy that exports eleven percent of its output is hard to coerce
The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts exports at 11 percent of GDP. That number disappoints anyone who wants trade to be the growth engine and reassures anyone who thinks a trade fight is cheap. Both readings make the same mistake about what an average is.