Loading ...Saturday Class – It’s Being Built, Baby, Built! – April 25, 2026
Brian Lantz takes you on the factory floor of the American economy: durable goods +8.2%, manufacturing construction +20.2%, machine tool orders +22.5%, the U.S. now the world’s third-largest steel producer. It’s being built, baby, built.
The S&P Global Manufacturing PMI hit 52.3 in March — the eighth consecutive month of growth.
The tariffs are working — and they aren’t going away
Between Liberation Day on April 2, 2025 and February 2026, the U.S. goods trade deficit fell 24%. The deficit with China is down 32%. With the European Union, it’s down nearly 40%. Tariffs have generated a 4.9% increase in federal receipts.
And they aren’t going away. People get nagged about this — your neighbor gets nagged about this. The Section 232 tariffs (1962 Trade Expansion Act) on steel, copper, and aluminum, the Section 301 and 122 tariffs (1974 Trade Act), and now the expansion of 232 to derivative products — products that contain steel, copper, or aluminum content — replace the IEEPA-based tariffs the Supreme Court overturned. Tariffs have been a feature of the American System since Hamilton and Washington. They’re continuing.
The result on the ground:
The United States is now the third-largest steel-producing nation in the world — we just passed Japan.
4 million tons of new crude steel-making capacity is expected to come online in the next two years across West Virginia, Arkansas, and South Carolina.
Century Aluminum, in joint venture with Emirates Global Aluminum, is building the first new U.S. aluminum smelter in decades — in Oklahoma.
Highland Copper, Ivanhoe Electric, Rio Tinto, and Wayland are expanding copper mining, smelting, and fabrication.
Machine tools, robotics, and physical AI
Machine tools — the machines that make the machines — are the heartbeat of any real industrial economy. Machine tool orders were up 22.5% in 2025. January 2026 orders ran 24.4% above the prior year. Cutting tools — drills, milling cutters, carbide-tipped inserts that get consumed by the machine tools as they work — are up 11.3% so far in 2026. That is a real-time gauge of physical production, and it is climbing.
On top of that, the Trump administration’s Genesis Mission — launched by executive order in November 2025 and led by the Department of Energy — is driving the merger of advanced CNC machine tools, robotics, and AI on the factory floor. Brian calls this physical AI: fenced-in, application-specific, machinist-supervised — AI as a tool of human creativity, not its replacement. Lyndon LaRouche made the machine-tool principle the center of his economic theory; the Trump administration is now building the policy and capital to deploy it at scale.
Where the workforce comes from
The single most important question for an industrial economy is: where do the skilled workers come from? National Apprenticeship Week runs April 26 – May 2. It is one piece of a much larger reality:
Enrollment in vocational two-year community college programs is up 11.7% since spring 2024. Trade-focused institutions are up nearly 20% since spring 2020.
The number of 18- to 20-year-olds earning associate degrees has jumped 50% — many of them with certificates in the trades.
The U.S. armed services — meeting recruitment quotas in record time — train enlisted men and women in the trades, mechanics, nursing, and the technical skills our industrial economy needs.
Energy unleashed — and the nuclear renaissance
Last week the White House issued five Presidential Determinations directing the Department of Energy, under the Defense Production Act of 1950, to deploy every tool the federal government has to expand oil, natural gas, coal, and large-scale energy projects. The National Energy Dominance Council — chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright — will run the operation.
On nuclear, the dam has broken:
On April 14, the White House established the National Initiative for American Space Nuclear Power — reactors in orbit by 2028, on the Moon by 2030.
The Air Force has selected Buckley AFB (Colorado) and Malmstrom AFB (Montana) for its first base micro-reactors.
New Jersey lifted its de facto nuclear moratorium on April 8.
California’s Diablo Canyon received a 20-year operational extension from the NRC on April 2.
Michigan’s Palisades plant is moving toward restart.
In Tennessee, Oak Ridge and the Tennessee Valley Authority are pushing forward — Kairos Power broke ground on April 17, and GE-Hitachi’s BWRX-300 is being built at the Clinch River site.
On March 31, all six New England governors — Republican and Democrat — issued a joint statement calling for a regional energy strategy built on nuclear power and advanced nuclear technologies. They don’t want to be an energy island. Reality is sinking in.