Colin Grabow cites Jones Act cost gap

Shipping costs are the story here — not in the abstract, but in the very literal sense of what it costs to move a box or a cargo leg by water. Colin Grabow pushed that back into view with a viral cost comparison that put Jones Act shipping beside an international route and made the gap look almost absurd. But the point is bigger than one screenshot. The Jones Act has spent a century making domestic water transport unusually expensive, and the latest flare-up landed because the numbers were simple enough for anyone to grasp. (cato.org) ### What is the Jones Act, exactly? The Jones Act is the part of U.S. law that says cargo moved between two U.S. ports has to travel on vessels that are U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-owned, and mostly U.S.-crewed. That means a ship can be perfectly legal for global trade and still be barred from carrying goods from(cato.org)uilding and maritime readiness, but the immediate economic effect is to shrink the pool of eligible ships. (cato.org) ### Why does that make costs jump so much? Because the protected fleet is expensive from the start. U.S.-built coastal and feeder ships have been priced around $190 million to $250 million, while a similar vessel from a foreign yard has been put near $30 million. If the ship itself costs many times more, the freight(cato.org)mestic coastal shipping in the U.S. often cannot come close to matching international prices. (cato.org) ### Why did Grabow’s post travel so far? Because it translated a policy fight into one clean ratio. You did not need to know maritime law to see the point. A domestic leg governed by the Jones Act looked roughly an order of magnitude more expensive per mile than an international alternative. That kind of comparison (cato.org) complaint: U.S. coastwise shipping is so protected that it often loses on cost to foreign trade over longer distances. (cato.org) ### Why do Puerto Rico and the Caribbean come up so fast? Because islands feel transport rules first. Puerto Rico depends heavily on waterborne trade with the mainland, and research on the island keeps finding that the burden falls hardest on goods that are heavy, sea-shipped, and awkward to containerize. One recent(cato.org) the Jones Act fleet serving Puerto Rico is concentrated in containerships and barges, while dry bulk ships, tankers, and general cargo vessels are scarce or missing. (cato.org) ### Why does vessel type matter? Because not everything should move in a container. Fuel, construction materials, oversized equipment, and other bulky cargoes often move best on tankers, bulk ships, or general cargo vessels. If those ships are rare in a protected trade, buyers do not just pay more — sometimes they lose access to the most sensi(cato.org)tem and starts reshaping what an island can buy, from whom, and at what frequency. (cato.org) ### Is this only about consumer prices? No — it also changes logistics behavior. When water transport is artificially costly, freight shifts to trucking, rail, or weird routing workarounds that would make less sense in a more open market. Cato’s long-running critique is that these distortions ripple through supply chains and production (cato.org) have to deal with the tradeoff that the law can make ordinary domestic shipping less flexible and less competitive. (cato.org) ### So what actually matters now? The viral post did not change the law. But it did something politics often needs — it gave critics a concrete, memorable way to show why the Jones Act keeps coming up in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and energy shipping fights. The bottom line is simple: when domestic water transport c(cato.org)d harder to ignore. (cato.org)