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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Typical Cato drama. Since when do they care about consumers?

The amortized cost of a $100M US cargo ship vs a $30M ship from India or whatever is peanuts.

The United States is the worlds pre-eminent maritime power. You need ships and the industry to support ships to maintain that. We also don’t want ships operated with the oversight of nations like Liberia in our coastal waters. The treason statement is dramatic, but there’s a legitimate point there… we enjoy the benefits of owning the water, and weakening that dominance to satisfy some phoney baloney principles will hurt the interests of the United States.

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>We also don’t want ships operated with the oversight of nations like Liberia in our coastal waters.

What are you talking about? There's tons of those already, they just can't go between 2 US ports directly.

>Since when do they care about consumers?

Since forever. Since when Donny slapped a 35% tariff on S.Korean major home appliances all prices in US jumped 35%, without change in quality - CATO institute called it and it definitely hit consumers.

>We also don’t want ships operated with the oversight of nations like Liberia in our coastal waters.

Jone's Act doesn't prevent that...

Note also that that the act requires that the ships be flagged in the US and staffed by 75% US workers. This means they're subject to US minimum wage laws, and there's a smaller labor pool to draw from, so there are additional costs that raise the price of each voyage, not just a higher upfront capital cost.

Additionally, since there are far fewer firms that can compete for these routes, I would expect that the margins on Jones act compliant shippers is much higher than the industry norm.

As an aside - the complete list of all Jones act ships can be found at https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2021-...

Using that information, it would be possible to find out where all of them are right now.

There's only 96 ships... 57 of them are tankers... and note that this also has implications for natural gas in New England this winter ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-england-risks-winter-blacko... ) because they typically get some LNG from international sources and that is going to be tighter this winter... so you need to get it from Texas instead, but the pipelines ( https://costcontrolassociates.com/blog/natural-gas-problems-... ) are at or near capacity and so you need to ship instead... but that gets into Jones act again.

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