Make It in America.
Again.
Washington promised that free trade with China and offshoring would make everyone richer. Wall Street did fine. The factory towns of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas got hollowed out, and the country lost the ability to make its own medicine, chips and ships.
What the Same Life Costs Now
Since December 2019, overall consumer prices are up 31%. The essentials families can't skip rose as fast or faster: gas up 67%, car insurance and electricity up 48%. BLS CPI-U, Dec 2019 to Sep 2026 [11]
The electricity figure here is the CPI price index. EIA's average price per kWh, used on the Energy page, rose 38% over a slightly different period. Both come from official data and measure the same trend in different ways.
Price Increase Since December 2019 (%)
Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted. December 2019 vs. September 2026, the latest month published. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics [11].
The Basics Got Expensive Fastest
- Gasoline: regular averaged $2.60 a gallon in 2019 and $4.31 in October 2026. EIA [13]
- Electricity: the average home paid 13.0¢ per kWh in 2019 and 18.0¢ over the 12 months to August 2026. EIA [14]
- Rent and groceries each rose about a third, a little faster than prices overall. BLS [11]
To be fair: wages have also risen since 2019, so how hard this hits depends on whether your pay kept up. Gas prices swing month to month (they're up 34% in the past year alone), and car insurance has eased since its February 2026 peak. BLS [11]
What It Costs Your Household
Enter what you spent per month in late 2019. We apply the official price change for each category. Defaults are the 2019 average U.S. household from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey [12]. Add your own rent.
That's 45% more for the same things, or about $366 extra every month.
U.S. Manufacturing Employment (millions)
Annual averages, rounded. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics [2].
One Decade, Nearly Six Million Jobs
In 2000, Congress granted China permanent normal trade relations, and it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The promise: trade would make China freer and America richer.
What happened instead was one of the fastest industrial collapses in American history. U.S. manufacturing employment fell from about 17.3 million in 2000 to 11.5 million by 2010. Landmark research by MIT and Harvard economists found Chinese import competition alone cost an estimated 2.0 to 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011 [1].
And the losses didn't spread evenly. They hit specific towns, such as furniture in North Carolina, textiles in the Carolinas and Georgia and electronics and auto parts across the Midwest. Follow-up studies found lasting damage in those places: lower wages, more disability claims, fewer marriages and higher rates of overdose deaths [4].
The Squeeze on American Families
Choose a topic to explore the data.
Cumulative Growth Since 1979 (%)
Net productivity vs. hourly compensation of production/nonsupervisory workers, 1979–2023, rounded. Source: Economic Policy Institute analysis of BLS/BEA data [6].
Workers Produce More but Take Home Less of It
Since 1979, American workers have become roughly 80% more productive. Typical worker pay rose only about 29% over the same period. The gains went to capital, shareholders and executives, often by moving production to wherever labor was cheapest.
To be fair: the size of this gap is debated. Counting benefits as well as wages, or using a different inflation measure, shrinks it. Most measures still find typical pay lagging productivity.
An America First economy measures success by the paycheck of the median worker, not by the stock market or the GDP of a global supply chain.
Median Age of First-Time Home Buyers
Source: National Association of Realtors, Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers; selected years, approximate [7].
The American Dream Is Being Priced Out
A generation ago, a young couple could buy a home in their twenties. Today, the typical first-time buyer is 40, a record high (NAR, 2025), and first-time buyers' share of the market has fallen to historic lows.
The causes are many: years of too little home building, restrictive local zoning, high interest rates, pushed up in part by heavy federal borrowing and rapid population growth that adds demand faster than supply. Investors, including foreign buyers, have also competed with families for starter homes.
Federal Spending, FY2024 ($ billions)
Source: Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review FY2024; figures rounded [8].
Interest Now Outruns Defense
The national debt stood at $40.56 trillion on Nov. 5, 2026 (Treasury). In FY2024, net interest on that debt ($881 billion) passed defense spending, and it kept rising: about $970 billion in FY2025 and $1.05 trillion in FY2026 (Treasury).
Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that doesn't build a road, pay a soldier or stay in a family's pocket. High federal borrowing also pushes up interest rates on mortgages and car loans for ordinary Americans.
U.S. Goods Trade Deficit with China ($ billions)
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Trade in Goods with China; rounded [3].
Exporting Jobs, Importing Dependence
The U.S. ran a trade deficit of about $932 billion in 2025, including a goods deficit of $1.26 trillion (BEA, Nov. 2026). The goods deficit with China peaked at $418 billion in 2018 and has shrunk since, partly because tariffs shifted some production to other countries.
Critics rightly point out that some imports just shifted from China to Vietnam and Mexico, sometimes with Chinese components inside. The lesson: tariffs alone aren't enough. They have to be paired with rules-of-origin enforcement and real investment in building things here.
A Country That Can't Make Things Can't Defend Itself
COVID exposed it. Masks, medicines and chips ran short because we had outsourced the factories that make them.
37% → 12%
America invented the microchip, yet our share of global chip manufacturing capacity fell from 37% in 1990 to about 12%. The most advanced chips are made overwhelmingly in Taiwan, 100 miles from mainland China [5].
~230× Capacity Gap
An unclassified U.S. Navy intelligence slide reported in 2023 estimated China's shipbuilding capacity at roughly 230 times that of the United States. In a long conflict, ships lost can't be replaced quickly [9].
Foreign-Dependent
Most active pharmaceutical ingredients for U.S. generic drugs are made overseas, heavily in China and India. The FDA and Congress have repeatedly flagged this as a national-security vulnerability [10].
Where Your Tax Dollars Went, FY2024
Total outlays about $6.75 trillion. Tap a row for details. Sources: U.S. Treasury (Monthly Treasury Statement, Table 9) and CBO [8], rounded.
Interest Is Eating the Budget
Washington spent about $6.75 trillion in FY2024 and took in about $4.9 trillion. It borrowed the difference, roughly $1.8 trillion, in a single year with no war or recession.
The America First approach: protect the earned benefits seniors paid for, cut waste and fraud aggressively, stop sending blank checks overseas and grow the economy by bringing industry home, because a bigger tax base of well-paid American workers is the only sustainable way out.
Your Family's Debt Share →You Run Washington: Balance the Budget
Washington spent $6.75 trillion in FY2024 and took in $4.92 trillion. Move the sliders to cut spending or raise revenue. Can you close a $1.83 trillion gap?
Spending −30% to +30%
Revenue −20% to +30%
Revenue sliders show the change in money collected, not tax rates. Higher rates don't always raise proportionally more, because people and businesses change behavior.
Your Budget
FY2024 figures from CBO, rounded. Illustrative only, since real changes ripple through the economy.
The American System
From the very first Congress, American leaders understood that a free nation must be able to supply itself, and they built the world's greatest industrial economy on purpose.
Seven Steps to Rebuild
Strategic Tariffs with Strict Rules of Origin
Protect critical industries and close the loophole of routing Chinese goods through third countries.
Bring Home Critical Supply Chains
Medicine, chips, steel, rare-earth processing and shipbuilding should be made in America or trusted allied nations.
Reward Companies That Build Here
Full immediate expensing for factories and equipment built in the United States.
Block Hostile Foreign Ownership
Restrict purchases of farmland, critical infrastructure and sensitive technology by adversary governments.
Build More Homes
Tie federal infrastructure dollars to local zoning reform and cut red tape that blocks starter homes.
Fiscal Discipline
Audit the Pentagon, cut improper payments and end foreign aid that doesn't serve clear American interests.
Train the Next Generation of Builders
Expand apprenticeships and trade schools. Not every good career needs a four-year degree and a mountain of debt.
Sources
- Acemoglu, Autor, Dorn, Hanson & Price, "Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s," Journal of Labor Economics 34(S1), 2016.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, All Employees, Manufacturing (CES3000000001).
- U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services; Trade in Goods with China.
- Autor, Dorn & Hanson, "The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade," Annual Review of Economics, 2016; and related work on community effects.
- Semiconductor Industry Association & Boston Consulting Group, "Government Incentives and US Competitiveness in Semiconductor Manufacturing," 2020.
- Economic Policy Institute, The Productivity–Pay Gap.
- National Association of Realtors, Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (2025 and historical).
- Congressional Budget Office, Monthly Budget Review: Summary for Fiscal Year 2024; U.S. Treasury, Debt to the Penny.
- U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence slide, as reported by multiple outlets in 2023.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration testimony on pharmaceutical supply-chain security; U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reports.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index (CPI-U, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted), December 2019 and September 2026: all items, food at home, rent of primary residence, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance, electricity; CPI news release, Table 2.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey: average annual expenditures of all consumer units, 2013–2019 (PDF). Monthly defaults are 2019 annual averages divided by 12.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Regular All Formulations Retail Gasoline Prices (2019 annual average; October 2026 monthly).
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.3: Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers (residential; 2019 annual; 12 months ending August 2026, preliminary).