Eighteen Trillion, Give or Take a Calculator
$18 trillion “being invested” is what you get when someone treats announcement-volume like a completed construction contract—then Reality shows up with a loud, red FALSE stamp. The trick isn’t that the number is big; it’s that the inputs are stretchy enough to include promises, exchanges, and other forms of maybe-that-sounds-like-money.
That’s how incentives work in Washington: headlines get paid in attention, not in follow-through. If you can win the day with a bigger total, nobody has to explain how it turns into a permit, a paycheck, a delivery schedule, or an audited ledger—just a whole lot of math that never touches a worksite. I keep mine honest with a library card and basic bookkeeping: if it isn’t a commitment, it isn’t investment; it’s theater you can’t bill in installments.