America Is Bleeding Capacity

From grid neglect to factory flight and a vanishing talent pool

The economy's fine. Sure. Low headline unemployment, AI tickers mooning, manufacturing sliding, housing starts downshifted, jobs growth squeezed into one sector: health care. The administration declared "Liberation Day" in April and the labor market hasn't really exhaled since.

The signal isn't subtle: policy is sandblasting away complexity, the very thing that makes an economy resilient.

Start with electricity, the bloodstream. A government "war on electrons" sounds dumb until the rules hit steel. Interior turned permitting into a loyalty test, every step marched past political appointees, while floating bans on wind/solar across public land and even flirting with rules that box private projects on private dirt. Transmission? The 5,000-megawatt Grain Belt Express got kneecapped after Energy yanked support because a senator felt cranky farmers at home. Grand strategy by county talk radio. Credibility gone. Build a modern grid? Or nah.

Tariffs turned from tool to roulette wheel. One week raw inputs, next week equipment, then a carve-out for somebody's photo op. Manufacturers can't model capex when the tax surface changes every Tuesday. The perverse result: more certainty offshore than on. Pick a flat 15% import toll abroad over America's shifting Jenga tower, and the spreadsheet shrugs. That's how you export capacity without signing a single FTA.

And then the sledgehammer to demand: EV credits gutted on the buyer side. Keep a trickle for producers, starve consumers, then ask why showrooms look like morgues on Tuesdays. More than two dozen projects (batteries, EVs, clean-tech plants) paused, canceled, or shuttered; ~$27 billion of industrial momentum killed. Meanwhile, Ford's CEO, no green teen, called Chinese EVs "far superior." Manufacturing stacks matter: batteries + motors + sensors + semis + software beating nostalgia + press releases.

But this isn't a renewables infomercial. Nuclear belongs in the kit. Always did. Some environmental outfits strangled it for decades, then noticed intermittency at 2 a.m. in February and discovered physics. Fine, late conversions welcome. Build firm power. Build geothermal. Build the wires. Build the storage. Build rooftop and small-scale where it pencils; build utility-scale where it doesn't trample communities (yes, the Eastern Shore story repeats: rooftop is a fight, fields are a fight, everything is a fight). Pretending one totem fuel "wins" is how you get blackouts and populists with bullhorns.

If the plan is "mine coins and train LLMs," then the grid has to grow, fast, while water rights and heat domes make yesterday's load models obsolete. Smother wind, solar, batteries, and transmission and guess what: even the pet industries of the regime choke. The lights don't care about ideology. Neither do data centers. (Your GPU cluster can't run on vibes.)

The System Picks Winners. Then Pretends It Didn't.

A lot of this isn't about energy; it's about money with a hall pass. Citizens United taught a master class in how to rent the state. When campaign cash sets the metronome, you get an "all-of-the-above" press conference and a one-of-the-donor ledger. Research budgets get shaved because experts are uppity; universities treated like enemies; visas turned into booby traps; the brain drain that was a trickle becomes a pipe. That's how a country forfeits biotech, chips, and materials science for a decade. That's how a lab in Zurich or Shenzhen reads the patent before Detroit even staffs the team. (Yes, the brain drain already started; look around the faculty rosters.)

Culture war paralyzes everything. Rural counties pass "no solar on farmland" ordinances while pretending an oil rig would be a heritage monument. Urban pundits sneer back, call it all fascism, and nothing gets built. Meanwhile, the pet calculation: 40% of U.S. corn diverted into ethanol to feed a 1978 idea; externalities socialized, profits privatized, and small engines die by the million.

When labor is chased off farms or out of meatpacking with the usual mix of performative raids and TV swagger, animals go unfed, pets get dumped, kids miss meals. Civilization is boring until it isn't. Try running a harvest with cable news immigration fantasies as the operating manual. It ends ugly and fast.

Some push back: "green is expensive," "EVs depreciate," "Europe tried and pays more," "China burns coal." All true somewhere, not dispositive everywhere. Rate structures can be dumb. OEMs overshot. China opens coal while building solar factories at a speed that makes heads spin. None of that changes the direction of travel: silicon and lithium are swallowing transport and bits are eating the rest.

Missing the train because the station manager is annoying is still missing the train. (Nuclear has to scale in parallel, not after a ten-year vibes parade.)

History isn't quiet on this. Spain ducked the industrial revolution, got small. The Ottomans fumbled electrification, got carved up. The Gilded Age was great if sitting on capital; not as fun for anyone else. The S&L face-plant, the Japanese "lost decades," the USSR selling oil to float an empire. Systems rot the same way: ossify, politicize cash flows, punish competence, reward theatrical loyalty, then pray. There's a reason strongmen end up with terrible intel: the bureaucracy spends its cycles protecting the boss from reality.

Media empires monetize grievance because grievance has a high ARPU. Legacy institutions peddled false equivalence long past its sell-by; then acted shocked when the arsonist won the fire code election. Voters picked vibes over plans. Donors wrote the plans. Courts blessed the donors. Congress atrophied. Executive orders became policy because lawmakers outsourced courage. Repeat until brittle.

So what now. The adult list, unsexy and necessary:

• Build transmission like it's Interstate 2.0. Pay people. Share upside locally. Stop hallucinating that wires are optional.

• Technology-neutral credits for firm, clean capacity; sunset at scale. No more zombies kept alive by tax gymnastics.

• End the whiplash. Stable five- to seven-year rule horizons for industrial capex. Change the game less; enforce the rules more.

• Immigration valves wide open for STEM talent. Green cards stapled to hard degrees; labs funded to keep them. Starve universities and watch competitors feast.

• Internalize real costs. Fossil subsidies were and are massive. Military protection of sea lanes isn't free. Pretending otherwise is just a lie that sends the bill to the ER and the insurer.

• Localize fights early. Community benefits baked in from day one. People aren't NIMBYs; people are rational. Show value. Share it. Don't sneer.

• Audit ethanol, full stop. If it pencils, it stays. If it doesn't, it goes. Same rule for every sacred cow.

One last thing: This is about choosing whether the next century is built here or bought from someone else. The current path builds a petrostate LARP: crypto hype, soybean exports, refined products, some defense hardware, and a whole lot of televised swagger. The competitor path builds stacks (batteries, motors, power electronics, software, reactors, wires) and sells them to everyone.

The first is easy politics and dead growth. The second is hard politics and compounding power.

Choose.

This opinion draws on certain elements from Robinson Meyer’s Trump Is Destroying the Future of America to Own the Libs, including select examples.