Pass on this "analysis". I'd rather speak with actual merchant mariners with 4+ decades experience in the industry and reams of data of actual merchant marine b

Pass on this "analysis". I'd rather speak with actual merchant mariners with 4+ decades experience in the industry and reams of data of actual merchant marine businesses and a bunch of other stakeholders like shipbuilders, DoD, municipality water utilities techs who have to deal with the industry on the coal face, ecologists, marine biologists, etc. to find out where the real skeletons lie in a scrap-vs-support discussion of the Jones Act. This kind of pablum that passes for "analysis" thrives upon readers not bringing externalities into the picture. When you lossy compress these types of decisions into a unidimensional pricing metric, the blowback from overlooked information always comes back to bite you in the ass after the ones who can monetize the externalities have long since absconded with the money and saddled the rest of us in taxes with the clean up bill. I'm completely open to scrapping the Jones Act and in fact my personal inclination is to scrap it. Once I find where the externality debt the authors were so desperate to hide is buried, and priced that into the full evaluation, like any balanced business decision should be made. After seeing up close first-hand the disaster that is Chinese food biosecurity, I'm not at all impressed with these capitalism über alles boosters who are not putting forth a proposal in good faith, instead just putting in a negotiating ploy. We see this all the time in our profession where someone blithely ignores technical debt of all kinds to meet a metric, grab their bonuses, and jet out the door before the business realizes they've been conned.