alt Hacker News>This has been studied to death. European shipyards have similar labor costs to a lot of America. They still build cheaper ships faster than we do. Same for Korea.
Europeans provide direct subsidy compared to American subsidy of just requiring certain ships to be built in America. Also, looking at recent trends, Europe has fallen out of favor as well with rise of Japan/Korea/China (https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/industrial-policy-lessons-shi...)
Also worth noting that Japan/Korea/China HEAVILY subsidize their ship building as well.
>And yet here we are, entirely dependent on foreign shipyards for basically any meaningful production.
Sure, because despite the subsidizes, economics was always going to make US ships unattractive.
>The Jones Act killed American shipping.
There is zero evidence that this did it because all evidence says if you repealed it, all shippers would just buy Chinese ships, flag them under flag of convenience and staff them all with overseas worker where they make 2000USD/yr.
BTW, there are Congressional proposals out there now called Ships for America Act (https://garamendi.house.gov/media/press-releases/garamendi-k...)
However, they are all just handing massive bags of money to shipbuilders. My guess is you have similar opposition.
>> The Jones Act killed American shipping.
> There is zero evidence that this did it because all evidence says if you repealed it, all shippers would just buy Chinese ships, flag them under flag of convenience and staff them all with overseas worker where they make 2000USD/yr.
You are both right, one in the long term, the other in the short term. The Jones act protected US shipbuilders from competition over a long term. Repealing it would expose them to extreme competition in the short term, when they suddenly need to compete with other shipyards on the open market.
There's probably no clean solution here. Repealing now would shake up the us market, some shipyards might close, others might scramble to catch up.
The thing is, if you wait 'till next year, it'll be worse. And the year after that even worse.
Meanwhile, compare eg the Netherlands with very high wages, punching far above its weight with Heerema, Mammoet, Damen, IHC, Boskalis, Van Oord, Allseas, Smit, and more. It's (mostly) illegal to operate their equipment in the US. Which makes all sorts of things more expensive than it should be. And american companies don't need to compete, don't need to even consider building heavy engineering hardware. The current situation is lose-lose.
(random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvicq-kvVbw Heerema Sleipnir)