Build, Baby, Build and The Dependency Crisis

How America will become a beggar nation

Picture this. You're the richest guy in the neighborhood. Beautiful house, fancy cars, all the toys. But you can't fix your own plumbing. Can't grow your own food. Can't make your own clothes. You depend entirely on others for everything you need to survive.

Now, imagine your neighbors start getting hostile. Or just decide they'd rather not deal with your crazy violent ass anymore.

How rich are you really? That's America in 2025.

Many people still believe that America has a robust manufacturing sector. They're living in 1953, when manufacturing was 28% of our GDP. Today it's 10.2%. We've gone from producing 68% of the world's machine tools to just 4%. From making half the world's polysilicon for solar panels in 2008 to watching China control over 90% today. We import 97% of our antibiotics and 80% of our rare earth elements. The F-35 fighter jet - our most advanced military aircraft - contains 417 kilograms of Chinese rare earth magnets per plane. It costs six times more to build a battery factory here than in China. They installed more solar panels and wind turbines last year than the rest of the world combined. They have 700,000 clean energy patents - more than half the world's total. China now produces 28.7% of everything made on Earth while we produce 16.8%. We've collapsed.

What America Imports Now

There's a lot of talk about who the Democratic Party will be, what we should value and promote, whether it's Zohran Mamdani or Gavin Newsom, what is the future of America. But one of the things I find frustrating is how little we talk about the actual building of things. We confuse spending with building. Spending is not building. Spending is simply spending.

We spend more on most things than other developed nations - healthcare, education, infrastructure, military. We spend and spend and spend. We're going to spend $77 trillion on healthcare over the next decade. But what do we get for that money? The most expensive per capita healthcare system delivering some of the lower results among our peers. An increasingly uneducated populace convinced the moon landing was fake or COVID was a hoax.

The New York Times just laid out where all this spending-not-building has gotten us. Last year, China installed more wind turbines and solar panels than the rest of the world combined. They're building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary. Meanwhile, Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest "trillions of dollars" to ship natural gas to Asia. GM just killed plans to make electric motors and will put $888 million into V-8 engines instead.

We're doubling down on whale oil while China discovered petroleum. We're missing the mark.

Their biggest companies have each introduced systems that can recharge electric cars in just five minutes. The Urumqi solar farm that came online last June is the largest in the world. The other 10 largest solar facilities? Also in China. BYD is building not one but two electric vehicle factories that will each produce twice as many cars as the largest car factory in the world.

We import 80% of our rare earth elements. 72% of pharmaceutical ingredients. 97% of our antibiotics. The machines that make other machines. Since 2009, over 200 Chinese-made high-voltage transformers have entered our grid. We rely on imports for 82% of these critical components.

We don't import because we lack resources. We have rare earth deposits. We have raw materials. We forgot how to process them. We're the chef who owns a farm but orders takeout.

What neither Democrats nor Republicans seem to understand is the building of things that we need. Zohran Mamdani talked about making New York City affordable, building grocery stores, a couple hundred thousand units of housing. But we're so far behind when it comes to industry and manufacturing and housing and healthcare infrastructure that these small leaps will not do us any good.

What we need is a massive move in a great direction. A wartime effort in peacetime. An arsenal of democracy for infrastructure and industry. Industry IS infrastructure in this country. Just like roads and bridges and airports and internet and cell phone networks and water and sewer plants, industry and all the various things that go along with it are also infrastructure, and they need public investment.

I'm not calling for a Manhattan Project for manufacturing. I'm calling for an arsenal of democracy for manufacturing, and then the Manhattan Projects would be in battery development, replacements for nickel, different battery designs, different solar voltaic panels. There would be half a dozen to a dozen different Manhattan Projects running simultaneously along with the arsenal of democracy.

During COVID, we discovered we couldn't make masks. Cotton and elastic. One factory fire in China could kill more Americans than any terrorist attack because they control our medicine cabinet.

Tim Cook explained it to Trump straight up - Apple needs 30,000 engineers on-site to support 700,000 workers, and America doesn't have them. We stopped training them. We told kids real engineering happens in clean offices, not dirty factories.

Robin Zeng from CATL says it costs six times more to build a battery factory in America than China. Not labor costs - ecosystem costs. China has "cluster manufacturing" where within a three-to-four hour drive, you have everything. The components, the manufacturer, the skilled workforce. "There's nowhere else globally where you can have all that innovation clustered together."

Since 2023, Chinese companies have announced $168 billion in foreign investments in clean energy manufacturing, generation and transmission. They're using clean energy to build multidecade financial, cultural and even military ties while we're trying to strong-arm allies into buying our gas.

We're Blockbuster in 2007. China's already streaming. But it's worse than that - we had the head start and decided to run backwards. We invented solar cells, lithium batteries, wind turbines. We had the future in our hands and threw it away. We made choices not to invest in the future, not to lead. We gave up on being better. Trump's energy secretary Chris Wright, a former gas executive, calls climate change "a side effect of building the modern world." That's Blockbuster's CEO saying Netflix is a niche business.

Madeleine Dean compared America's trade deficit to her relationship with her hairdresser. "I have a pretty large trade deficit with my local grocer or my hairdresser. It's a good thing. It means I have money enough to get my hair done."

She thinks imports mean we're "rich" - but we're not importing prosperity, we're importing dependency. My Papaw didn't have a trade deficit with his grocer. He had a job that paid enough to feed a family. That's the difference they don't get.

The Navy can't build ships on time - we don't have enough welders. Boeing can't build planes that don't fall apart. Intel lost the chip race to Taiwan. We can't quickly increase production of anything because we lack capability, not capital.

Manufacturing isn't about single factories. It's ecosystems. Thousands of suppliers. Engineers who understand production. Workers who know materials. We destroyed that ecosystem and now discover we can't just throw money at bringing it back.

"China is huge," said Praveer Sinha, CEO of Tata Power. "Huge means huge. No one in the world can compete with that."

China committed to clean energy and as one official said, "all aspects of society — government, policy, private sector, engineering, everybody — work hard toward the same goal under a coordinated effort." They went from making flip-flops to making clean tech. From importing oil to exporting the future.

Neither the government nor our businesses work very well on their own. Capitalism needs the lubrication of socialism. The competition and management of the state to keep them producing well. It's too easy to become lazy when you're sitting at the top of a pile.

We've got all this GDP, all this cash, all this money, and we're fucking squandering it on the past. We need to be on a building spree, not a spending spree. For that building spree to occur, we're going to have to do things we haven't done in the last 70 or 80 years. Mobilize our businesses and our government together to get things done, to get things built, to improve our lives.

More healthcare equals more access. Medicare for all can't do it alone. We need healthcare for all. That means clinics like post offices in remote areas staffed by doctors and nurses. Enough hospitals per capita. Enough beds. Enough grocery stores with healthy options so people aren't eating shit constantly.

The smart people say automation means we don't need manufacturing. That's backwards. When factories employed thousands, those thousands got paychecks. When factories run on robots, whoever owns the robots captures all the value. China installed 276,000 industrial robots last year - more than the rest of the world combined. They're not automating away jobs. They're automating away our future.

A nation that can't make things is not a nation. It's a market.

China is taking us to lunch. China is eating us for breakfast, utilizing our system. They're betting everything on owning the means of production for the clean energy economy. We're betting on being really good customers.

The clock is ticking. Every factory they build is knowledge we lose. Every robot they deploy is a future we don't control. We used to be the Arsenal of Democracy. Now we're the customer of autocracy.

Build, baby, build. Not spend, baby, spend.