Summary: The U.S. permitting process for infrastructure projects is slow and complicated, which hinders both economic growth and national security. Polls show strong support for permitting reform, as seen in Germany, where changes have led to faster renewable energy deployment. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is boosting solar manufacturing, but challenges remain with tariffs and labor demands against automation.
America’s onerous permitting regime hurts state capacity even more than it hurts the private sector, since government involvement triggers rules like NEPA. (View Highlight)
In Germany, securing approvals for one 2022 project to erect three wind turbines required 36,000 pages of documentation printed out and handed to the authorities…Since then, German red tape has been drastically reduced (View Highlight)
the most effective industrial policy, at least right now, is for government to act as the spur for the private sector to invest its own money. (View Highlight)
China is considering injecting up to 1 trillion yuan ($142 billion) of capital into its biggest state banks to increase their capacity to support the struggling economy (View Highlight)
people are seeing too much of what they want to see, and that the simplistic identity-based rules that Americans learned to use in the 2010s are actually not that good at describing political reality. (View Highlight)
instead of tariffs, the U.S. should reduce the incentive for offshoring by cracking down on tax havens. (View Highlight)
the manufacturing sector plays an outsize role in private research spending. When manufacturing heads offshore, entire supply chains and engineering know-how follow. (View Highlight)