📃 How an archaic, burdensome law has been able to withstand scrutiny and persist for almost a century

🛤 U.S. railways and roadways are being pushed to their limit. The Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that fixing the country’s surface transportation infrastructure would require an investment of at least $155 billion per year, which amounts to roughly 23 per cent of the government’s $666 billion budget deficit in 2017.

🛤 Meanwhile, heightened reliance on trucks and freight trains not only increases infrastructure and maintenance costs from wear and tear on roads, bridges, and rail but also generates greater environmental costs. Surface transportation produces more carbon emissions than ships do, and its more intensive use increases the likelihood of highway accidents and train derailments involving hazardous materials. Relatedly, time wasted in growing traffic congestion — especially on highways running parallel to U.S. sea lanes — generates enormous opportunity costs from lost wages and lost output.

⛴️ Artificially inflated waterborne shipping rates increase demand for alternative forms of transportation, including trucking, rail, and pipeline services, raising those modes’ rates and inflating business costs throughout the supply chain. Transportation expenses — incurred to move raw materials and intermediate goods to the next stage in the production process and final product to retailers and end users — comprise a significant portion of the cost of goods sold. Elevated transportation costs affect nearly every business in nearly every industry, rippling through supply chains, squeezing profits, curtailing business investment, and disadvantaging U.S. companies relative to their foreign competitors, and depriving U.S. households of savings to spend elsewhere in the economy or to invest.

⛴️ While the law’s most direct consequence is to raise transportation costs, which are passed down through supply chains and ultimately reflected in higher retail prices, it generates enormous collateral damage through excessive wear and tear on the country’s infrastructure, time wasted in traffic congestion, and the accumulated health and environmental toll caused by unnecessary carbon emissions and hazardous material spills from trucks and trains.

⛴️ Maritime Administrator and retired rear admiral Mark H. Buzby testified that “over the last few decades, the U.S. maritime industry has suffered losses as companies, ships, and jobs moved overseas.” The Jones Act fleet is not only shrinking but rapidly aging. The typical economically useful life of a ship is 20 years.24 Yet three of every four U.S. container ships are more than 20 years old, and 65 per cent are more than 30 years old. Excluding tankers, the ships in the Jones Act fleet currently average 30 years old, fully 11 years older than the average age of a ship in the world merchant fleet of other developed countries.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bear