Each year, the Progressive Policy Institute releases its annual Investment Heroes report, which highlights the country's largest companies that are investing in the U.S.

• This year's report underlines the strong U.S. economic growth and highlights the important role of capital investments to consumers.

Michael Mandel, vice president and chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, shares the top-ranking companies and dives deeper into the report's findings.

1. First things first: How do this year's findings in the Investment Heroes report stack up?

Mandel: Let me start with the big picture first. Capital investment in the U.S. is crucial. It leads to more jobs for Americans. It leads to better jobs for Americans. It leads to a stronger American economy.

We published our first Investment Heroes report in 2012. Our goal was to identify those companies investing the most in America.

• We developed a methodology that only used publicly available financial data to estimate domestic investment for large U.S. companies.

The No. 1 company on our list this year is Amazon — making five years at the top, which is truly amazing.

• Amazon invested an estimated $36.8 billion in the U.S. in 2023.
• Since 2019, Amazon has invested $183 billion in the U.S., according to PPI's estimates. This staggering investment on productive capital has helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In the No. 2 spot of the 2024 Investment Heroes list is Alphabet, with an estimated $24.5 billion in domestic capital spending in 2023.

It's followed by Meta, AT&T, Verizon, Walmart, Intel, Microsoft, Comcast and Duke Energy.

• Filling out the rest of the Investment Heroes List is Chevron, Charter, ExxonMobil, Dominion, PG&E, Apple, ConocoPhillips, Oracle, GM, Tesla, Exelon, United Airlines, FedEx, Occidental and Delta Air Lines.

Taken as a whole, this year's Top 25 Investment Heroes invested a record $328.3 billion in the U.S. in 2023.

We've been tracking this for years, and for the past few years our Investment Heroes have seen their capital spending in the U.S. grow faster than overall non-residential capital investment.

• Since 2019, domestic capital expenditures by PPI's Investment Heroes have risen by 35% compared to a 24% increase in total non-residential investment over the same period.

Here's another sign of growth: In the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, PPI's Investment Heroes invested more than $900 billion in the U.S. economy.

• That's almost 40% more than the comparable total In the first three years of the Trump-Pence administration.

This massive surge in capital spending has helped power job creation and economic growth.

• The U.S. economy is outperforming Europe and Japan by a wide margin in large part due to the domestic investment of the companies on this year's list.
• For example, over the past year, European Union GDP grew by 0.7%, and the U.S. GDP grew by 3x as much at 3.1%. That's pretty amazing.

2. Why it's important: When you look at this data, how can corporate investment drive consumers' financial growth?

Mandel: One thing that capital investment does is generate jobs, especially high productivity and high-wage jobs.

Americans also care about the cost of living and inflation. If we drill down, patterns of capital spending have a big impact on prices.

• For example, housing is expensive. A big part of why housing is expensive is because we haven't built enough homes in the past few years, so housing prices go up.

On the flip side, the huge domestic capital investments by companies such as Amazon, Alphabet, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are boosting capacity and helping hold down U.S. prices related to tech, broadband and e-commerce.

• Take internet access. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that the cost of internet access, once you've accounted for increases in speed, has gone down over the past 10 years.
• That's a function of the vast sum spent on extending and upgrading broadband networks across the country, which have enabled capacity to keep up with soaring demand.

Let's turn to the price of data processing, which is essential for today's economy.

• Companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft have invested heavily in data centers all around the country. In a large part due to this increase in capacity, the price of data processing has barely gone up over the past 10 years.
• The low price of data processing gets passed on through business costs to consumers. So even if you personally don't see this directly, it shows up in the prices that you pay.

E-commerce is one area where deep investments have helped build capacity and hold down prices.

• The way the BLS measures prices in e-commerce is by measuring gross margins, which is the difference between what merchants pay for their goods and what they sell those goods for.
• What we've seen over the past 10 years is that these margins have risen at a very slow rate, and that's helped hold down the price of goods that are sold by e-commerce.

The bottom line is more capital spending by corporations means fewer bottlenecks and supply squeezes and less upward pressure on prices, which is good news for us all.

3. The takeaway: What do you want government leaders and business leaders to walk away with from this conversation?

Mandel: When I look at the big picture, progressives usually emphasize the need to regulate large companies, but working-class Americans also benefit from policies that boost domestic capital investment.

We started this list in 2012 and called it "Investment Heroes: Who's Betting on America's Future?" We wanted to emphasize the benefits of investing in America.

• Even more, we wanted to identify those companies who had faith in the future of the American economy coming out of the financial crisis.
• It's 12 years later, and we still want to highlight those companies who are putting their money to work in America.

The Progressive Policy Institute is firmly in favor of trade and the global economy, but we must have investment in the U.S. to create jobs Americans can be proud of and to provide goods and services that working-class Americans can afford.

• So when we look at this from the point-of-view of government policy, bad corporate behaviors should be regulated and discouraged. But good corporate behaviors should be encouraged.
• In particular, we should all applaud investment in the U.S. that creates jobs and holds down prices.

Read the full report.