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Notes -
I would love to see a Twitter-style poll with the following options:
A) Keep Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
B) Keep Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
C) Repeal Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs
D) Repeal Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs
I'd love to see not only percentages, but some mental models from the people in different categories. This in inspired by seeing both Zvi's latest on the Jones Act and MR linking one estimate related to possible Trump tariffs.
Zvi doesn't sum it up super nicely, but estimates I see of the value of repealing the Jones Act are \approx 3% reduction in cost of goods (just due to the flagging effect) and a claim that a plausible OOM estimate is \approx 3% GDP increase (I lost the thread the other day on how to put approximately signs in without strikeout). The randomly-linked twitter post estimates price increases due to tariffs mostly around 2-3%, with some specific sectors rising up to 13%.
I suspect that most people just don't mentally look at economic estimates and compare them to each other, but I don't know what else goes on in their heads. If they're trying to justify one or the other position, how do they go about it? Is it at all plausible if we apply their justification to the other question?
Finally, heresthetics. Could an 'omnibus' option (D) bill be pushed, saying, "That old, bad, just banning stuff style protectionism clearly failed; we shot ourselves in the foot and didn't even manage to actually protect an industry in the process. Instead, tariffs will be the way; at the very least, taxes are slightly more pleasing to the economist than specific bans, as they still allow price signals to work somewhat and inspire new solutions, while at least collecting some revenue for a debt-strapped gov't"? Obviously, people would horrifically oppose it, but what would they say when they oppose it? What would the reasoning be? How would that reasoning come across to the people who would respond with a different choice from the list?
I'm going to take a very controversial stance and support keeping the Jones Act. If the goal is to develop US shipbuilding for security reasons, there needs to be an actual shipbuilding industry. US shipbuilding is currently so horrendously inefficient that it will be instantly vaporized by Korea, Japan and... China most of all. US shipbuilding is not 50% less competitive, they're 500% less competitive. Instant loss. And if you nuke your shipbuilding sector who is going to build warships? Why would you want to make your warships within the Chinese missile death zone? Real great powers know how to make their own ships.
It makes zero sense to do all this onshoring and neo-mercantilism in microchips, strategic materials and leave out shipbuilding. There are all kinds of things you could do to introduce efficiencies and market discipline without razing the industry to the ground. Shock therapy is not the answer, there needs to be careful, judicious reform. Import technology and best practices from allies, reform regulations, bring in technical experts, break up cartels or cozy price fixers. Nationalize - China State Shipbuilding is the biggest shipbuilder in the world and is profitable too.
How is it that the US can build rockets, jet fighters and cars but ships are beyond them... because they protected their own market? The Chinese protect their own auto industry - lo and behold they produce huge numbers of cheap cars. The Koreans protected their auto industry for decades and turned it into a competitive export industry. The EU protects its agriculture and isn't a famine-stricken wasteland. Americans aren't some alien race that has an inherent -500% to Shipbuilding, there must be other problems than protection.
There's a strictly superior solution: repeal the Jones Act and use the resultant economic gains to fund shipbuilding directly. 3% of the US GDP, the top level estimates; $880 billion. This is 27 times the navy's current shipbuilding budget; 22 times the total US shipbuilding market. (Yes, the vast majority of it is already warships.) Oh, and it's 3.4 times the entire budget of the US Navy. Needless to say, this would completely eliminate any issue of decaying capacity. For that kind of money, we could build 60 new aircraft carriers each year (and then sink them all because it'd be impossible to man them) and have enough budget left over to nearly triple our normal construction.
Of course, if such a proposal were put to the public, I believe we'd rapidly find we do not value our shipbuilding capability at $880 billion. The Jones Act is a near-total failure in its stated aims, but even if it were a fantastic success, even if it only cost the US economy a tenth as much as it actually does, it still wouldn't be worth it, and it only survives by hiding its true costs.
(Not a fan of tariffs either, of course.)
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