Odd LotsWe finally did it. We finally did an episode on the Jones Act. For years on the podcast, we've been referencing this controversial law from 1920, which places restrictions on domestic port-to-port transport in the United States. But we had never actually done an episode on what it is, why it was created, and why people feel so fervently about either keeping or maintaining it. There are plenty of people who feel that this law is an inhibitor of US growth, because domestic water-based shipment of goods requires a US-flagged, US-crewed, and US-built vessel. And yet the law persists — for over a century now. At our live show in Washington DC, we spoked with the Cato Institute's Colin Grabow (who took the anti side) and the Transportation Institute's Sara Fuentes (who took the pro side). They explained their respective positions on questions of the economics and national security in a lively, heated (but polite) debate.
Read more:
Jones Act Descended From Centuries of Lazy Protectionism
East Coast Gas Would Only Drop a Dime If Jones Act Lifted, Says JPMorgan
Jones Act Ships Competitive for US Fuel Exports as Freight Soars
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Jill Wisenthal.
Joe, this is the big one. We are about to ruin our most long running joke all for this.
What is our next most running joke? Anyway? Yes, we are ruining a lot.
So we've joked for years and years and years about how we should do an episode on the Jones Act because it's come up obviously in dozens of episodes. We did actually talk about it quite a bit in different contexts, but we've never done an episode actually talking about the infamous law.
That's right, and since we waited so long, I guess we had to do it a little bit differently.
Style.
We had a style, yep. So for those of us who came to our life event in Washington, DC recently, you will have seen exactly what format we did this in. But it's a debate. So we had someone who is pro Jones Act debating with someone who is anti Jones Act live on stage. Things got heated, things got emotional, but always entertaining and informative.
It was heated, you know, I've joked, you know, like people have very strong feelings about the Jones Act, And when we did it live on stage, we separated our two guests at the end of the stage, you know, sort of tongue in cheek you out because but actually, you know, it's like really intensive. People feel very strongly about this law, which restricts if you're going to ship something from one point in the US to another point in the US by water, it has to be on a US built, a US crewed, in US flagged ship.
People feel very strongly.
About this law.
That's right, and it's kind of interesting also to look at it as a little peatree dish of industrial policy. I think is one of the reasons we first started getting interested in this, along with a lot of the supply chain disruptions that we were experiencing around the pandemic time. But our two debaters were Zadafuntest, the vice president for Government Affairs at the Transportation Institute, and Colin Grabow, and associate director at the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Deful Center for Trade Policy Studies. Zada took the pro side and Colin took the anti side, And as I said, we had some pretty good arguments on both sides. So take a listen see if it changes your mind. I'm sure if you're listening to this you probably already have an opinion. But here we go. Before we start, I got to ask how many people have heard of the Jones Act.
Here?
Wait, actually, let's just hear, like get a temperature of both sides. So shout if you think the Jones Act should be repealed, and shout if you think we should keep the Jones Act.
Wow, shout if you just feel strongly about the Jones Act either way. Yeah, all right, everyone has an opinion. Okay, we are giving up on our longest running joke and finally doing the Jones Act episode. We thought we'd do something a little bit special. Instead of just having one guest, we actually have two. It's going to be an all thoughts debate, someone arguing the pro side and someone on the con side.
That's right, We're not going to formally declear a winner. Everyone's a winner. They're not formal.
Rules in terms of you know, there's no mike mute or anything. But we are hoping we are going to have a spirited discussion about this very controversial law. People feel really strongly about this law one way or another, and so we are going.
To finally, we don't actually do a lot of debates on.
The show at It's a rule at my house that you can't talk about politics or the Jones Act or crypto at Thanksgiving. Okay, So without further ado, we do have the perfect guests. We're going to be speaking with Zada Funtest. She is the vice president for Government Affairs at the Transportation Institute.
And we have Colin Grabow.
He is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. So welcome to the stage, Zarda and Colin.
All right, Colin and Sarah, thank you so much. We're finally talking the Jones Act. Colin, why don't we start with you? Why should we get rid of the edge? Why did you even agree to come out here and talk about some random shipping law from the early nineteen hundreds, and why do you devote time to it and why do you want to kill it?
Well, Joe Tracy, first off, thanks for having me to debate this issue. Thanks for doing ending the long running joke and finally talking about it. So, yeah, the Jones Act, Well, why am I so against it? I think the US maritime policy should try to achieve two goals. It should provide us with efficient domestic transportation by water, which is really important because we have lots of water in the United States. We have thousands of miles of coastline home to major metropolitan areas. We have the Great Lakes, we have a vast network of inland waterways, have a.
Contiguas and territories.
So we have this big resource and we totally underutilize it by making the cost of transportation so expensive. The other thing we need to do is meet national security goals. We need to have shipyards, we need to have ships, we need to have mariners to crue those ships. And I don't think the Jones Act does a good job of meeting either one of those goals. So I talked about shipping water transfer being expensive.
Why is that?
Well, we should back up and say what is does the Jones Act? Do Jones Act?
Everyone's giving history lessons tonight, so you might as well go all the way back.
Oh, so the Jones Act is section twenty seven. If the Merchant mari Enact of nineteen twenty was essentially states that if you want to move goods by water, you have to use a vessel that meets for conditions, it has to be US flagged, it has to be US built, it has to be crewed by Americans. It has to be at least seventy five percent owned by Americans. Now, these provisions make water transportation extremely expensive. Less than one percent of the world world ships comply with the US flag requirement. That means ninety nine percent of the world ships are off the table if you want to move something within the United States. If you look at a map of all the ships operating than US waters, they're.
Full of foreign ships.
We have foreign ships everywhere. We can't use them. So right, there's let's supply the US flag ships are about four times more expensive to operate than foreign flagships, and when it comes to building that ship, they cost about four to five times more to build than those built overseas, so that has huge capital costs.
You put that.
Combination together and you're going to get very expensive shipping. You know how expensive. There was a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study in twenty twelve. The founder was twice as expensive to send a container from the East Coast to Puerto Rico, where the Jonzac applies as to send to neighboring Jamaica or the Dominican Republic. In twenty seventeen, the CEO of a JONESAC shipping company admitted that Jones A tankers were three to four times more expensive than internationally flag tankers. I mean just yesterday at Center and you in Connecticut rather testify for the state legislature, saying that his first job out of college, he used to work in bulk shipping, and that moving goods within the United States was five, sometimes ten times more expensive than using internationally flagged vessels. So this is the profound cost. I mean, distance is a barrier to a trade between Americans, and this makes water transportation incredibly expensive. It's a barrier just doing business with each other.
Okay, so the one thing we can agree on is America is hashtag blessed in terms of inland water ways. But Sada, I want to bring you in, so feel free to give us your own history lesson. But the Jones Act doesn't exist just to boost prices of shipping. There are other reasons, such as security. So why don't we go way back in history and talk a little bit more about why this act actually exists?
Sure, So the reasons for the Jones Act are the same today as they were.
When it passed in nineteen twenty.
And also some form of you know, Jones AC can also be referred to as cabotage laws. Some former cabotage law has existed.
What's cage meanin.
It basically means if you're moving goods between two points, that you want those goods to move on a vessel register to your country. Right, And it's really extremely common. Eighty percent of the world's coastline is governed by some former cabotage.
You see it in other industries. Right.
You can't take air China from New York to la Right. So it's extremely common.
Across modes across the world.
But I love the Jones Act, and I love it so much you can really I like to put the reasons I like it into three categories. Economic security, national security, and homeland security. Economic security is pretty obvious, right, because of that US crew US owned requirement, It's created about six hundred and fifty thousand jobs, six hundred and fifteen thousand and one if you include Collins. And also all those and all those jobs are for Americans, right, Those Americans are paying taxes. Those companies are paying American taxes. That economic security also includes self sufficiency, which especially matters in our non contiguous trades, which I hope we get into a little bit more. The men and women who crew our Jones Act vessels are the exact same people who crew our sealed vessels in time of emergency. Not only that, but you also get a shipyard industrial base. I've heard you all talk on the show. You all well know that navy shipbuilding is really feast or famine, right. There's a lot of unpredictability in that market, and so the Jones Act is kind of a final line of defense that ensures you do have some shipyard workers. You have a shipyard industrial base that can be spun up when needed. Third category is homeland security.
Right, that's pretty obvious.
You don't want to just open up our beautiful inland waterways, our great lakes.
To the cheapest option.
The US flag that Colin mentioned matters quite a bit, right. It means that our vessels are inspected by the Coastguard. We know that they're not polluting and linking. It means that the mariners are known by the Coastguard. They've gone through background checks, they've been t trained to the highest standard worldwide. And so you know, think about those inland waterways. Those are you know, those run by stadiums, they run by refineries, they run.
By personal homes.
You don't want to just have whoever there just because they happen to be the cheapest and save a couple bucks.
Okay, but thank you first of all.
And I take your point about the six hundred and fifty thousand jobs, but you know there's three hundred something million Americans who aren't employed by the Jones Act per Collins argument, paying more for any goods. Why should the rest of US three hundred and thirty million Americans who aren't employed, and me and Tracy maybe partially because it comes up so often, who aren't Jones Act employed? What about the cost of that? So why should we be bearing that cost?
So I take it to the with the cost argument, right, and I don't necessarily think that's true. You can look at the US Virgin Islands, right, which does not have the Jones Act, and compare prices there to Puerto Rico, and you'll see that the Virgin Islands is actually more expensive. And what matters to consumers isn't just cost anyway, right, It's reliability. It's that stability in the marketplace and knowing everybody is playing by the same set of rules, knowing that shipment will show up, and that really matters. And also, I would say the Jones Act doesn't involve any government dollars, right, So the taxpayer is not paying to subsidize this fleet. But if you got rid of the Jones Act, you would have to eventually pay for those mariners, pay for those shipyard workers, and make those investments. So the government's going to pay for that regardless. So do you want it to be taxpayer dollars or do you want it to be ameliorated and sort of baked into something just the cost of doing business in the United States.
I think it's helpful for these types of things to think about the counterfactual sometimes. So I'm going to ask both of you to respond to this question. But if we got rid of the Jones Act tomorrow, waived a magic maritime wand or whatever, and I went away, what would the world look like? Let's do call in first.
Well, I think that's a great question, because the real cost the Jones Act is not that it costs x amount of dollars more to send a container to Puerto Rico. It's what does the United States look like with the Jones Act versus what does the United States look like without the Jones Act? And the United States without the Jones Act is a country that is better connected to each other through more efficient supply chains. We can envision, for example, right now, we make shipment of oil so expensive that we export it all over the place, but East Coast refineries will import it from say Nigeria or Saudi Arabia instead of Texas because it's just not competitive after you factor in the cost of shipping. Some goods are impossible to ship within the United States because of the Jones Act. With the United States is one of the world's leading exporters of liquified petroleum gas basically propane. Puerto Rico buys it from foreign sources. Phy buys it from as far away as West Africa. Not because it's more expensive. There are zero ships to transport. It's literally impossible because of the Jones Act. We've seen examples of lumber producers in Pacific Northwest saying, look, we go to send our lumber to other parts of the United States. We're getting beat out by Canadian competitors that can use more efficient international shipping, so we're being put on the back foot. We've seen government report side examples of steel in the Western United States being purchased from Asia instead of Eastern producers. Why because multiple times it says Jones Act shipping makes it uncompetitive for Americans to sell to other Americans. So we think about all the supply chains that we better connected, all the efficiencies that would bring. On the more micro level, you can think of, say, ferry operators in Washington State that could buy ferries a half a third of the cost of what they're paying now to modernize their fleets and improve transportation. So I think that the difference between the US as is versus without the Jones Act, it would be a huge, huge gain.
Sara, I'm glad you asked that.
World without the Jones Act is a pretty scary place, right, because I want you to remember the content.
I'm serious. I want you to think about the context we're living in. Right.
The People's Republic of China has made a strategic decision to overinvest in its own maritime capability.
They are deliberately.
Undermining the prices low bullying the prices for shipbuilding, for shipping services, for ship to shore cranes. They want to be the only provider out there, right, They want the whole world to be dependent on them for shipping because they know that is the backbone of commerce, right, is how we transport these goods. So if we waive that magic wand first off, so six hundred fifty thousand people would be out of work, which would be a brain on your taxpayers, right, so we would have to pay for that. You would basically eliminate the American shipbuilding industry overnight. Because even Japan, even South Korea cannot keep up with Chinese subsidies. They're exiting the container ship market, they're exiting other shipbuilding markets. So absolutely China would swoop in and do that. You would also have ships of unknown provinces, right, but they'd probably be owned by China through various shell companies crewed by unbedded mariners, sailing moving hazardous materials at best case, up and down our inland waterways past all these soft targets. So if you wanted to keep that security on the seas, right, you would have to I don't know, quadruple the sides of the Coast Guard or the CBP to do those vessel inspections right now that you know, Coast Guard CBP you know, are active at international courts, certain courts where foreign vessels can come and visit.
But you would have to really increase that.
I mean, keep in mind, the Coastguard is smaller than the NYPD. They do not have the bandwidth to handle all these unregistered ships that we don't know how safe they are, we don't know how much they're polluting, you don't know who's on there. I think it is very scary. I was totally serious.
To Collins point about, you know, various entities within the United States having the important you talked about national security or economic security, and the fact that for like base commodities, you know, for example, at times when there's a really tough winter in New England that we can't ship LNG from Houston to New England. Doesn't that create an economic vulnerability for the US, the fact that we can't supply ourselves with our own raw materials in certain instances.
So I don't think that's true. And I think that your New England LNG example.
Is a really good one, right because what happens all too frequently is the Jonzact becomes a cover and a.
Scapegoat for other policy failures.
Right, New England has an energy policy issue that I love ships, But the cheapest, most efficient way to move natural gas is as gas in a pipeline, right, if they want, And so if they want, they also don't have storage capacity, right, which means they cannot buy natural gas during low season. They're only ever buying it at peak, and their need is a radic so they don't have a long term charter. They're buying it on the spot. And what's really expensive about liquified.
Natural gas is that liquification.
So if you were to take gas out of Pennsylvania, first you got to move it down a pipeline. You got to liquify it and then move it and then regasify it. And then you can only do this it's very small amounts, right, which is going to be more expensive because it really matters is that kind of volume. So even if the transportation we're free, you're already looking at having to charge quite a lot of money for gas in New England, right, So even though it was free, you still are going to bear that cost. So in order for gas in New England to be cheap, you would have to force energy producers and those kind of liquifying facilities to do this at below market rate.
Right.
We're in a capitalist society, so people are going to look for the cheapest option, and sometimes the cheapest option is not going to be American. So the liquified natural gas is a great example.
Colin, could I ask you to respond to the sort of national security point, because when you hear statistics like the Coast Guard is smaller than the New York Police Force, that seems pretty worrying.
Yeah.
So a couple arguments that have been made here. One is about the alleged danger of foreign ships and having them in our waters. Folks. The choice here is not do we let foreign ships into our waters? And do we not? They're here, They're already here. You can go out like marine traffic dot com. It will show you all the ships in US waters.
You can find foreign.
Ships sailing up to Albany, New York. You can see them sailing past Philadelphia, up to New Orleans, up to Sacramento.
That Jones.
That doesn't say you can't come into US waters. It just regulates what you can do. Within US waters. So they're here and talk about hazardous materials. I mean, they're all the tankers coming out of Houston Corpus Christi with energy products. I mean the vast majority are foreigns, so they're already here. We have customs and border protection, we have the Coastguard to inspect these vessels. They are subject to port state control. So I find that a bit of a red herring. With regard to the issue with China, I find this ironic because Jones Act shipping companies are some of the biggest patrons of Chinese shipyards. I mentioned earlier that US built ships are incredibly expensive, you know, four to five times more. Well, one result of this is that people don't want to buy new ships, so they keep old ships going for a long time. Internationally, ships are used for twenty twenty five thirty years. The last seventeen Jones Act ships they were scrapped had an average age of like forty three. So they'd keep these old ships running, and they do it by sending them to China to get maintained a Chinese state owned shipyards. And they turn around and use the money they save from going to China instead of a US or an allied shipyard and say, please keep the Jones Act in place. It's really critical for a national security to stop China. I mean, we're joking, but this is real life. I mean two years ago at Jones Act shipping company Paytia, they took a forty three year old ship built in nineteen eighty and it was bill of steam power. So instead of supporting US shipyards buying a new ship, no, no, no, they sent to China, ripped out the steam power, put in LNG, spent tens of millions of dollars to do so, so we can keep running for years to come, and then we tell ourselves it's all about national security.
Thing.
That's farcical.
Soda.
Shipyard repair and shipbuilding are two very distinct industries, and you're correct we don't have the shipyard repair work in the United.
States that we should have. I'm very glad. I'm not a businessman.
I don't have to make these types of business decisions. But frankly, you can't really get ship repair work done even in our allies because China has low balled that market so so much.
Why isn't they're more of a shipbuilding industry Given the existence of the jones AC and the theoretical natural demand or the theoretical demand that creates Why is shipbuilding so meager in the United States? And why aren't they building more Jones AC compliance ships right now given the evident scarcity.
Sure, so the reason you don't see as much shipping as I would like is frankly because we've chosen as a nation to make investments in other modes. Right if shipping was subsidized in the same way that trucking was, right, think about the high system, think about pipelines, think about all these other areas where a lot of goods have moved. So the shipbuilding market is right size for the Jones Act, right, So we are, you know, right now? We build it enough ships that we need for the jone deck market. We don't scrap super easily like China does, because scrapping is expensive and bad for the environment. So yeah, we like to extend the useful life of our vessels as much as possible. We don't do it scrap and rebuild pricing scheme like China does, right, which is a big, big part of it. And I wish that we did build more ships for the international market. And I think we may see a shift in that right, like from the Ships for America Act and some other areas. But what's really been happening is in the nineteen eighties, the United States decide to step away from construction subsidies, which are very very strong in the rest of the world. Right, so the United States decides, We're not going to do any more ship building subsidies. You have to build here, but you know, you have to use American laws, American workers, et cetera.
And at the same time that.
We did that, South Korea, Japan, Europe all invested trillions in terms of subsidies, in terms of financial schemes and other options. What China has done is really astounding. CSIS has a new report out this year about how they're just flooding the market with tonnage to try and drive.
Out all of their shipbuilders.
So you're seeing even our allies having to close their shipyards and decrease their shipbuilding because of the unfair playing field that's done by China. So if you say let's get rid of the Jones at, let's get rid of this US build requirement, you're basically throwing our shipyards to the wolves, right and saying Okay, you keep fighting by American rules. You have to pay minimum wage standards, you had to have safety standards, and you have to go fight against a shipyard in China where people don't even have shoes on. Right, you know it's not a fair fight. So if we were living in a perfect free market world, we'd.
Be having a different discussion. But we're not. Shipbuilding is a strategic asset, all right.
I'm going to ask a sort of middle ground question in an attempt to reconcile both positions. But let's say you don't get to throw away the Jones Act, but you get to make a change to it. And you get to keep the Jones Act, but you have to make a change to it.
Good question.
What would the response be, Zara, Let's start with you.
The change I would make to the Jones Act is that I would add shipbuilding subsidies.
Okay, Colin, I would absolutely get rid of the US build requirement. The notion that we promote I mean, forget the economic effects here. Just the notion that we promote a healthy maritime industry by forcing Americans be outrageous prices for new ships is on its face absurd. We heard talk earlier about what we needed to preserve ship building. Well, how's that worked out? A GEO report last month referenced the US shipbuild industry as in a state of near total collapse. The Wallstreet Journal just last weekend article to refer to the US shipbuilding industry is tiny and rusty. In twenty twenty three, the most recent year for which we have data, the US account for zero point one percent of global shipbuilding output. I mean, obviously we're well behind China, but folks, we're behind Norway, the Netherlands. I think in twenty twenty two, we're behind Croatia. This is the United States is one of the biggest manufacturers in the world and incredibly inventive, dynamic economy, and this is what we've been reduced to. It's shameful and it's an indictment of what the Jones Act has done.
Well.
Actually, I want to ask you about this. Do you accept I mean CATO I associate with like nod industrial policy sort of true, less fair? Do you accept the premise setting aside how we get there? Do you accept the premise that the US should have more domestic ship building?
I think that we should have you know, I defer to the national security experts what we should have, but absolutely we should have it, and the Jones Act does not give it to us. So I'm not against government intervention per se. So, for example, I think we need ships. I'm not against subsizing ships where the government says, here's money in exchange and time of war, we get to grab that ship and use that.
That makes sense to me.
You can cost benefit analysis, the X bunch money gets you, you know this, many ships. We can't that with the Jones Let's stop doing things that don't work and do things that do work.
So I would take issue with the fact that you say that US shipbuilding is expensive. Shipbuilding is expensive, is expensive everywhere. Our shipbuilding is right priced, right, everybody else is cheating. Is kind of what's going on? Like all these countries you mentioned have heavy subsidies, financial schemes. Look at the two biggest cost drivers in shipbuilding are labor and steel components, right, and so of course labor is more expensive in the United States. That's true for every American industry. Right, we have a higher standard of living, we pay taxes. And then look at steel. The top steel producer in the world is China. Do you think that they are selling charting market prices for their steel.
No, of course not.
If I may so. I think there may be a notion here that people think, okay, things are okay, and then China came along, or you know, the US is okay, and then South Korea came along and things were okay. Then Japan came along.
Folks.
US shipbuilding has been internationally on competitive since the Civil War. Okay, this is not something that happened recently. It's been going and nobody is buying ships from Norway instead of the United States because of the cheap wages.
That's absurd.
You know, there was an article I remember, like fifteen twenty years ago that said that Dutch shipyards were building ships at one third the US price and paying their workers twenty to forty percent more. It's indefensible.
I actually there's a question about the jonesack that I've had for a long time, and I want to get your take on.
Colin.
We did this interview with John Arnold, the philanthropase. He does a lot of stuff like with like policies, and we asked some you know, we talked about like mb stuff and highways and stuff and we're like, and Tracy said, well, what do you think about the you know, would you put any effort towards appealing the Jones Act. He's like, I'm not even gonna try that. One's not going anywhere. Can you describe to me six hundred and fifty thousand people? I don't know, you know whatever, Why given the meager size of the US shipbuilding industry, is it perceived that this law is so hard to dislike?
It seems like such a political hot for some reason.
Yeah, So the question is why why is this laws so difficult? Why does the remain in place despite my, you know, criticism people like me? What I would submit this is a tribute to the power of special interests. You know, I can come up with off the time ahead problems.
Apparently not a big one, I can both of you.
It's a small industry, yes, so, satura reference six hundred fifty thousand jobs. That's based on a study that calculated there were somewhere like ninety eight thousand jobs actually in the domestic maritime industry. Each one of those has a multiplier of like five, and you add those together and that's.
The theory that should make it even less of yeah.
I mean no, it's a small industry, right, so why does the remain in place? And the dynamic is this, there are any number of organizations dedicated to preserving the Jones Act. There's an American Maritime Partnership where Sarah is also what vice president, I believe, the Transportation Institute, the Lake Care Association, of a Marine Service Association, the American Waterway Operators and Marine Engineers Beneficial Association, Seafares International Union. I go on and on. I can't think of any industry in DC and association where task pro already one, two or three is get rid of the Jones Act. In fact, I've had conversations with folks where they say something like, look, I hate the Jones Act. I think it hurts our industry. But on my top ten list of issues, it's like number four or five and versus one, two and three. I need to support as senators that support the Jones Act. And this is a dynamic you see over and over again. It's concentrated benefits dispersed costs. The people that care the most about the Jones Act, that think this is existential to me are the people in the companies in the industry, those and they allocate their resources accordingly. So it's just it's you can find any number of ridiculous laws like you sugar program, same basic dynamic. We see it over and over and over again.
Sarah, I'm going to give you the chance to respond, why are you so good at your job?
Now?
It's easy. The Jones Act is popular.
It's been popular with Republicans, it's popular with Democrats, It's popular across administrations. It's also really popular with the United States and military heads of transportation command militarily see if command.
The Navy have been.
Asked about this multiple times and they all find a lot of value in it. They know that if you didn't have that, we would see our shipbuilding capability and most importantly, we would lose those mariners. Right, These mariners that crew these sealerships, they need time at sea to train to be ready to move up in their ratings. Right, So they need that work as well so they can be called upon when they need and they answer the call. They've answered the call many many times. You know, in every war you've had a merchant rain component and it's critical. So it's successful because it's popular, it's well loved, like it's a extreme, it's extremely effective. Like I said, you're going to pay these costs regardless, So do we want to spread it out? We're all in this society here, we all share, we all enjoy these benefits. The savings that Colin is talking about is a rounding error. You know, the reason laws don't exist just to save us money? Right, that's not the old That's not how you determine if a law is good or not. Does it save people a couple of pennies or let's be real, does it shave shippers a couple of pennies?
Right?
Like, even if Collin's cost arguments are accurate, are those cost savings going to be passed down to the consumer?
I mean, costs are costs.
I don't know. All right, we could go on and on and on, but a big round of applause for these two. It's not easy to come on stage and debate these sakes.
So thank you, Thank you so much, Tracy.
I'm so glad we finally did the Jones Zach episode. And to be honest, it actually fulfilled all of my hopes and wishes for the episode.
That's good. Did it change your mind at all?
Did it change my mind. I mean that presupposes that I had an opinion.
I guess what you don't have opinions?
Well, I guess what I would say is that, at least if we think that shipbuilding in the US is important, and I think I am convinced of that the Jones Act, our current structure is clearly not sufficing.
Yeah, I would broadly agree with that, because if you look at I guess it's sort of the proof is in the pudding, right, if you look at the outcome of the Jones Act, it hasn't actually been that successful in terms of American shipbuilding. One funny thing, right before we recorded this, we asked the audience who was in favor of the Jones Act and who was against it? And I swear like it was pretty evenly split. But also everyone in the audience raised their hand at one point or another. Yeah, everyone held an opinion on the Jones Act.
I know, it is really polarizing. And I thought, like our guests, like, you know, I didn't wanted to. I did a good job of having it be kind of heated intents on stage. Of course, it is like very civil and a good conversation. But I thought from listening to Colin and Sada that you know, you actually got a pretty good sense of how strongly the opposite sides feel about this, like very old law.
Oh yeah, totally. It was a great rundown of like the arguments for and against for sure, all right, shall we leave it there.
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the ad Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and.
I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guests Colin Grabow he's at CP GRABO, and Sadafrentis. Actually she's not on X probably wisely, but you can follow the Transportation Institute at trans Underscore. I NST follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Arma, Dash Ol Bennett at dashbod and Keil Brooks at Cale Brooks. More Odd Thoughts content go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots. We have all of our episodes in the daily newsletter, and you can shout about all of these topics, including plenty more Jones Zach talk in our discord dot gg slash lots.
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