Precinct-level action and pension fund capital balances can be a powerful combination
Two curves stand between us and a better future. I’m going to introduce them, what they mean, and offer some thoughts about how we can bend them back in a positive direction.
The Curves
Curve #1 is the Treasury yield. This affects mortgage rates, car loans, business loans, the stock market, and virtually anything else financial. The market yield for 30-year Treasury securities has more than doubled in the past 5 years and shows no signs of abating. The bond market is forcefully telling our country that a $40 trillion national debt is unacceptable at current rates and that unless we restore a more sustainable debt/income relationship, money is going to get a lot more expensive, with major adverse consequences for our personal lives and national power.
That brings us to Curve #2: investment in manufacturing. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has evolved from a comprehensive superpower into a financial hyperpower but a manufacturing middle power. This fundamentally unbalanced structure drives inequality of opportunity, creates wealth gaps, and fans the flames of political polarization to the detriment of our democracy. It drives powerful forces that are bending Curve #1 against us. For the past 6 quarters and running, private investment in physical manufacturing assets has been declining.
Here’s why that matters: American firms own a manufacturing industrial base that is likely worth about a trillion dollars. But China’s is significantly larger. In a long-term global strategic competition, the factory floor plays a major role in determining who prevails.
It’s not just about making bombs and bullets, but rather, about forging domestic employment and a culture of makers who emphasize creativity, execution, and innovation. Metaphorically speaking, we’re trailing by two touchdowns in the second quarter but are now running plays more slowly. This must change, and fast.
Their Consequences
Having creditors lose faith and money become more expensive would be highly disruptive in a society where so many daily necessities–cars, homes, and even food are paid for with debt. When the national ledger gets out of balance, it’s the local community that feels the ‘heat or eat’ decisions first. Yet if we cannot find the discipline to remodel public accounts, the global market will do it for us painfully. Becoming more comprehensively productive and filling the Middle Class back in is a critical part of the restoration equation.
This brings us to the factory floor. Failing to reinvigorate American manufacturing would also have tremendous consequences. The idea that White Collar and Blue Collar exist in different ecosystems fails the test of reality. Manufacturing is the first thing to go offshore, but ultimately, design, engineering, and a lot of the financial functions follow. Put more bluntly, closing the factory is usually just the first set of living wage jobs to go, not the only one.
Places that make and the capital, industrial, and human fabric that supply them tend to form clusters, a phenomenon borne out by centuries of historical experience across multiple countries. I would prefer that we maximize the number of industrial clusters here in the U.S., especially for critical industries like semiconductors, biotech, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, vehicles, and advanced materials.
We want the universities, design centers, and the factories themselves. This helps produce stable jobs that benefit lives. A full value chain economic approach demands a holistic approach to the humans that make the machines go. That means deep, reform-oriented thinking about education, energy, healthcare, immigration, water policy, and other issues where at least at the federal level, the current partisan tribalism severely impedes progress. This political dysfunction has immediate practical consequences.
A person forced to self medicate or go without cannot truly exercise an informed right to self determination. Similarly, people in a household facing “heat or eat” decisions or whose water has been polluted by Forever Chemicals see their potential sapped day by day, week by week.
Addressing these fundamental needs is a North Star of truth that many parts of our political order have become un-anchored from. As John Adams and his colleagues wrote in 1780: “Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.”
Recent decades’ drift away from the core principles Adams so clearly articulated requires urgent remedial action, lest drift harden into a more permanent detachment. This brings us to the “hard questions,” which culminate in “what shall we do?” A succession of momentous moments are quietly but surely meeting and compounding upon one another. Will we meet them and harness them?
Or will the crescendoing moments instead drive us? That would be the darker path, one of further polarization and passive relinquishment. We would plunge into an algorithmic abyss that sells our own capabilities short. There is a better way.
Bending the Curves Back Our Way
A more positive future will not deliver itself through our passive inaction. Instead, it demands vigorous attention and an attitude of ownership from every member of society to ensure that private action becomes the motivating foundation of government reform.
So how might we discipline public spending to tame the bond yield curve while simultaneously investing in the educational and physical infrastructure needed to build a healthier, maker-centric society?
One starter action to move toward this “spend less, spend better, and grow faster” future would be to require that American public pension funds invest a certain proportion of their asset under management in either education assets (like community college and vocational training programs to build the manufacturing workforce) or key facilitating infrastructure such as electricity and water provision assets.
Multiple U.S. states governments have in the past imposed Renewable Portfolio Standards for electricity sourcing and there is a federal renewable fuels standard that underpins ethanol production and corn demand. I mention these programs not to explicitly endorse them, but rather, to emphasize that the legislative and implementation machinery for mandates that can help steer capital toward desired investment outcomes already exist and have been proven at scale in practice.
The Balance Favors Us–If We Step Up and Act
Embracing the path of proactive action could unleash a new Rooseveltian era of reform, renewed industrial and societal vigor, and lay a foundation for progress that ensures my grandchildren’s standard of life far exceeds mine. We have a lot going for us. An industrious people, favorable geography, a top-tier technology development ecosystem, deep capital markets that attract investors from all around the world, and ample natural resources. The amber waves of grain that so poetically grace America the Beautiful’s lyrics are but one natural blessing and are accompanied now by abundant oil, gas, wind, and solar energy. Geothermal and nuclear energy stand next in the line of prospective Renaissance.
Campaigns aren’t won by a culture war. Rather, victory comes through the schoolhouse door, a beckoning shore, and the factory floor. It is not just the work of my generation to change that.
All 340 million of us are in this together. We can bend the money and manufacturing curves back in the direction of a New American Century if we turn this into a new national project of renewal, improvement, and progress rooted in private action and restrained government.
Suggested Citation: Gabriel Collins, “U.S. Re-Industrialization: Mobilizing Local Action and Reallocating Capital to Build National Resilience,” The Sinews of Civilization, Substack, 8 September 2026. https://gabrielcollins.substack.com/p/us-reindustrialization-pension-capital-resilience
Nerd Appendix: The Two Curves Charted
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