Hey, hope you’ve had a great week. If you’re planning to splurge on a loved one — or yourself — this weekend, don’t bet on your tax refund to cover the outlay.

We’ve got all the numbers you need to know about tax season and V-day in today’s newsletter, plus a look at how expensive the big-ticket items like houses and cars have gotten since my grandparents were starting their family.

First though, as big tech companies keep testing investor’s patience for AI spending, and our power bills buckle under increased electricity demand, let’s look at how America is fairing in the race to power the future.

— Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

“Staggering.” That is the word Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia, uses to describe China’s energy buildup.

“They’ve built more power generation capacity in the last four years than the entire U.S. grid combined,” he said.   

In just the last year alone, China added the equivalent of 40% of the electrical capacity of the entire United States, according to Brookings Institution senior fellow Kyle Chan. It’s nowhere near done.

“China is projected to double its wind capacity, probably triple its solar capacity, and 6x its battery capacity by 2030,” said Leslie Abrahams, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

One cluster of solar farms in Western China, the Talatan Solar Park, covers 162 square miles of desert; that is 7 times the size of Manhattan for just one solar park.

China’s lead is not just in renewables. “They are also the top investors in other technologies like large-scale nuclear,” said Abrahams. “So they have almost 30 reactors currently under construction , which is about 50% of all global development.”

If energy is a race, the U.S. is losing it.

“The U.S. struggles to build out new energy,” said Brookings’ Kyle Chan. “It’s not a problem that the U.S. has really dealt with before, given that there wasn’t really that much growth and energy demand until now with AI.” 

China has been adding energy for many years to power its manufacturing base, and, if anything, is building more than necessary, analysts said. The U.S., by contrast, has experienced decades of demand stagnation and underinvestment that have made it hard to adjust.

“We lost muscle memory with how to build new power generation,” said Bordoff. “The poles and the wires in the system are old, and we haven't had to build new power in this country for a long time. It's difficult to get permits. There are all sorts of bottlenecks,” he said. 

In the 1950s, you could buy a house for nearly $7,400, a new car for $1,450 and a pair of Levis jeans for a few bucks. 

Even after adjusting for inflation, the prices for these items stand at about $98,900, $19,400, and $45, respectively — much less than their current price tag. The median sales price for a house in the U.S. reached over $410,000 last year, while the average new car price  jumped to $50,000 and a pair of Levi’s might run you $75. 

While it seems natural that the cost of goods rise over time thanks to inflation, that hasn’t been true throughout America’s history, said Thomas Stapleford, a historian at the University of Notre Dame and the author of “The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics.”

There was a big spike in consumer prices during the Revolutionary War, then prices dropped off afterwards, Stapleford said. 

Prices similarly jumped up during the War of 1812, then dropped off, experiencing a long, slow decline until about 1860, Stapleford said. “Right about before the Civil War, the general consumer price level in the U.S. is almost identical to what it was 90 years before,” Stapleford said. 

Prices then fluctuated up until World War II. “At that point, prices start rising, and they don't stop,” Stapleford said. 

So what explains the rise in costs?

Depending on which expert you ask, the U.S. needs somewhere between 2 million and 5 million more homes to address the country’s shortage.

On top of that, a lot of the housing stock we already have is vulnerable to increasing climate and weather changes. In 2024, Hurricane Helene destroyed 1,000 homes in North Carolina alone. In 2025, the Southern California wildfires destroyed more than 12,000 homes — mine among them.

When we lost our 99-year-old house in the Altadena fire a year ago, poet Mary Brancaccio, my wife, remarked that we had the perfect house for the last hundred years. What we needed to build, she said, was a house for the next hundred. As we planned our rebuild, we met a lot of neighbors looking to build differently.

People like Heidi Luest, who’s got property about three blocks east of mine. She lost a beloved house of 25 years in the Eaton fire a little more than a year ago. But what she’s rebuilding is something more.

“I'm building a bunker. So I decided to name my house Edith,” Luest said.

As in, Edith Bunker, from the ‘70s sitcom “All in the Family.”

“Sorry, I have to make a joke out of everything,” Luest said. “But I figured, as long as I have a house and it's gonna be strong and sturdy, why not give her a name?”

Luest is building with panels that look like they’re pressed from Styrofoam cups. These are “insulated concrete forms.”

“So it's ICF blocks. It's basically 2-inch foam, 6-inch concrete, another 2-inch foam,” she explained. “You put rebar in the center and you pour concrete in it. It can take up to 250 mile-an-hour winds. It's gonna give me a four- to six-hour firewall. And I probably won't need any heating or cooling because it's that insulated. It’s like a Lego. It's got the tongue and groove, and they kind of snap together.”

It's a creative approach from a creative person.

“I'm a scenic artist,” she said. “I've done backdrops for the movie and music industry. I did a Katy Perry Super Bowl halftime show in the backyard. I've done props for Lady Gaga.”

It’s too bad we can't just paint a backdrop of our houses and call it a day, but that doesn't quite work. You can't live in those. But we can live in a concrete house, built quickly with snap-together panels.

“I'm saving in labor because it's not back-breaking,” Luest said. “Literally, there's only three guys building it.”

Let “Freedom” ring! After a copyright snag, Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté got the all-clear to perform his Minions-themed routine at the Olympics this week, finishing in 25th in men’s short program.

Figure skaters mostly performed to classical music for years, but the sport’s governing body loosened its rules in 2014 to allow tracks with lyrics, paving the way for crowd-pleasing hits and banana-obsessed cartoon characters.

But modern music comes with modern problems. Most classical compositions are in the public domain, but today’s pop hits have many credited writers, and samples can inflate that list. (“Freedom,” just one of a few songs in Sabaté’s routine, samples Naughty by Nature and a YouTube video.) There are pre-cleared songs skaters can choose from, but straying beyond that list means there are a lot of people to ask for permission — and that’s before payment even comes up.

“Lord, it's just too much for an athlete to handle on their own,” Benom Plumb, a former licensing executive turned academic, told Marketplace’s Carla Javier.

Luckily Sabaté got his routine through with just a couple hours to spare. It might have helped that the Minions are owned by NBCUniversal, the same company broadcasting the Olympics in the U.S.