Huh? Are you saying it doesn't produce a small reserve of merchant shipping vessels?
This all or nothing thinking isn't helpful. Utterly useless? Some n ships is better than no ships.
This all or nothing thinking isn't helpful. Utterly useless? Some n ships is better than no ships.
I'm also pointing out that the national security argument doesn't hold water because being able to construct a small ship every couple of years is not going to be useful if we encounter a period where we need to build hundreds of vessels per year. We'd have to build that infrastructure from the ground up like we did in WW2. We'd have to do this whether or not the Jones Act is in place.
Therefore, I think it's better to scrap the Jones Act entirely. It's all cost, no benefit.
That'd be the a big part of the argument for the value of preserving even a wildly insufficient level of manufacturing capability for certain vital goods, I'd expect—that is, it may not be necessary that the effect is to have a large and thriving shipbuilding industry, for it to still be worth it.
What the last ~3 years have taught us is that a country should not have critical dependencies on another country. The keywords for the first part of the 21st century will be Deglobalization and aging societies, better buckle up.
The Jones Act has more than one requirement, and while some of them are useful, others very much are not.
It’s vastly faster to start with a small team that knows how to build stuff and expand that team than it is to start completely from scratch. But you can only maintain that knowledge by actually building stuff.
So yes it’s inefficient in peacetime, but so is having the worlds most powerful military. It’s silly to spend that kind of money on a military and then leave easily exploitable weakness in our logistics.
I'm not suggesting WWIII would be short because someone wins it, just that if a nuclear exchange happens there won't be enough left to keep fighting with.
An India vs Pakistan war could continue after a nuclear exchange as they don’t have that many nuclear weapons to glass each other and survivors would presumably want vengeance.
For the US it might take a reasonably effective missile defense system, but that’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Anyway, I personally don’t believe the US has a highly effective nuclear defense system, but even the possibility of such changes the calculus of war. The more bombs you need to send to each target the fewer targets you can hit. DC and NYC are presumably fucked either way, but Tuscaloosa Alabama could easily survive the second scenario.
It’s completely theoretical at this point, but coming up for plausible scenarios where the Jones Act ends up worthwhile doesn’t seem that difficult.
The US is a net energy exporter.
Of course, this presumes rational actors on all sides, which is very much not a given (esp. looking at Russia right now).
Peacetime subsidies are only useful for capabilities that would be prohibitively costly or long to setup un time of war.
Also the act aids not just in building ships but also managing, maintaining, and crewing them. The skills and lessons learned over time of a domestic industry vs a ~0.2% increase in boat shipping costs is worth considering. Especially as most do these costs relate to paying US workers and US taxes.