The Preposterous Jones Act Linkages Being Created Out Of Thin Air By Cato Institute And Its Acolytes

Mark Twain’s famous observation has been put to work by many folks who like to use cherry-picked, out of context numbers to make their point. Cato Institute has certainly been adroit at this in a four year campaign against the Jones Act. If their position was they were against the Jones Act if it resulted in any added economic cost, an indisputable fact based on America’s higher labor rates compared to other countries, my takeaway would be they had a firm grasp of the obvious. I wouldn’t agree with their position but there would be no reason to take issue with it. But when they distort, exaggerate and outright fabricate numbers on a subject that is known well to me based on decades of relevant experience, that gets my attention. I’ve taken it upon myself to challenge the misinformation and distortions they spread even though I no longer have any dog in this fight. My view is that the best way to inoculate their lies, damned lies and choreographed statistics is with facts and truth.

I admit to being a bit surprised myself that I’m even writing this. One of my New Year’s resolutions was that there are certainly more constructive uses of my time than writing more about Cato Institute’s latest misrepresentations regarding the Jones Act. After all, Colin Grabow, the Cato Institute person exclusively focused on spreading Jones Act inaccuracies and hyperbole, was getting repetitious. In the 54 months he’s been with Cato, he’s consistently been at work against the Jones Act starting with his October 2017 blog titled “Jones Act Is A Swamp Creature That’s Strangling Puerto Rico”. While also dabbling in writing about other trade issues in his first few months in addition to the Jones Act, by mid-2018 when I first became aware of his efforts he was focused exclusively on the Jones Act and has been ever since. Perhaps his colorful headline in that initial article, a hyperbolic flourish that continues to distinguish his writing, grabbed the attention of folk who have continued to support his Jones Act work. In any case, if you’ve read one of Colin’s articles, you’ve almost read all of them as cherry-picked, out of context points, primarily lifted from the work by others, are recycled, spun and re-spun. However, his multiyear campaign to change the hundred-year-old law has gone nowhere. By any objective view his efforts should be seen as in the rear view mirror, getting smaller as time moves on. You can even see this in Colin’s reduced Twitter activity on the Jones Act. The actual data that shows that is detailed in the table below.

As you can see, in the latest three month period, his actual Jones Act tweets were down 69% compared to three months in mid-2020 when I last cared enough to tabulate his Twitter activity. Colin just isn’t showing the same vim and vigor evident in his earlier tweeting. His reduced overall activity was driven by both declines in the percent of days he tweeted as well as less average tweets on the days in which he tweeted. A comparison of just the last month in each of those periods showed even more pronounced declines, as the table above shows.

That being said, Colin is certainly still staying busy on Twitter where 100% of his Tweets are on the Jones Act. Using the midpoint on those periods of 7.2 Tweets per day and assuming it represents his average for the 47 months I’ve been aware of him, which anecdotal observations points to being on the low end, that works out to 10,289 Tweets Jones Act tweets. It is readily apparent that Colin is a master Twitterer. What isn’t apparent is what such rampant messaging in 128 and 256 character bursts has to do with the original and fact based research most of us associate with think tanks. While he’s prolific, a handful of the same themes are repeated hundreds and thousands of times. Colin obviously ascribes to the view, sadly confirmed too many times with recent events that if you repeat distorted and alternative facts enough times, that misinformation actually takes hold with some people. He compounds that effect by planting seeds with other influencers that lead to articles, creating an echo chamber of misinformation. Some of Colin’s more popular myths and his busy bee role in pollinating them with others is in an October article on Medium accessible via the following link: https://medium.com/@john-d-mccown/if-it-sounds-like-jones-act-critics-are-singing-from-the-same-songbook-62e9ebe6b9cf. As that article covers many of the tropes and misleading claims repeatedly spread by Colin, this article will focus on solely on some real whoppers, three of the most preposterous Jones Act linkages made by Cato Institute and its acolytes to date. When you get into the numbers, the ridiculousness of the specific claims they are making becomes readily apparent. My hope is that should make all reasonable people reading this article recognize that Colin’s agenda involves neither facts nor the truth.

The first and most recent preposterous claim, and the very catalyst for my writing this article, came in a CNBC interview US on February 17, 2022 featuring Scott Lincicome, a colleague of Colin’s at Cato Institute, and titled “Why US Ports Are Some Of The Least Efficient In The World”. Scott blamed this and the current port congestion situation in part on the Jones Act, saying in its absence there would be less port calls by the larger vessels and more feeding containers to and from other ports via smaller vessels. This is a recurring theme with Cato Institute related to both feeding marine containers and moving pure domestic containers by water that without the Jones Act, a exponentially larger number of such moves would occur. At a distance, it sounds good and there is no doubt that scale economics has folks who don’t know the container shipping industry recognizing the cost per unit mile on water is geometrically less than either of the land modes. That part is right, but the ship itself is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the total cost of such movements. And for the relatively short distance in the movements Cato is referencing, it’s a very small part of the total costs involved. Scott might not know this, but Colin certainly should as I made him directly aware of the cost economics of container shipping when I first became aware of his efforts and before I realized he had an agenda indifferent to facts that didn’t fit with that agenda.

Let’s enlighten Scott on why his claim last month that the Jones Act plays a role in port congestion is nonsense. We’ll move right past the nonsensical claim that double handling the same container in a given port could ever improve congestion at that port and focus only on the cost increases that would result from what he is proposing. To develop that cost comparison, we’ll use credible figures on the costs of moving a container by the various modes. A key cost and the one that drives the differences across modes can be referred to as the linehaul cost, which is the linear cost of moving freight from one point to another. Linehaul cost will vary proportionately with distance and excludes any setup costs at either end. For the relative linehaul cost per mode, we’ll refer to a 330-page book on the modern cargo shipping industry titled “Giants Of The Sea”. This 2021 book written by me included a chapter on shipping versus other transport modes that focused on those modes in the U.S. The relative linehaul cost per mode from that book is shown in the table below. Using the relative cost factors, the table includes what that currently translates into in terms of cost per 40’ container mile and how the water and rail modes compare to truck linehaul costs.

The relative cost factors and current per mile figures above are a good broad approximation of the linehaul costs across modes in the U.S. The relative difference tends to remain fairly consistent over time and across market conditions, in part due to the large fuel cost component in each mode. By definition, the faster the mode, the more fuel per equivalent unit is used and the higher the relative cost. More precise numbers for the segments within each mode can be obtained, but the per mile figures above broadly align with the current linehaul cost for moving 40’ containers in efficient configurations in each mode and are readily sufficient for our purposes.

As the table shows, both water and rail have linehaul costs geometrically lower than truck costs. However, where the modal cost comparison changes is when the setup costs are considered. In the truck case, they are virtually non-existent as attaching or dropping off a load involves just a few minutes of time for just the driver. Both water and rail modes have two forms of setup costs that need to be accounted for to make them comparable to truck movements. The larger cost is the labor to load and unload the container onto the doublestack railcar or the ship along with the associated cost of moving the container through a terminal. In addition, because the terminal itself isn’t the origin or destination, there is a local pickup and delivery cost by truck that needs to be included. The table below summarizes an approximation of what those setup costs typically run per 40’ container and is shown by mode in addition to the linehaul costs per 40’ mile.

Note that the setup costs generally are the same on each end and the table above shows the combined total for both ends. While the local pickup and delivery costs are similar for the water and rail modes, the cargo handling and terminal costs at the former are higher as it is a more complicated operation with additional processes involved. Those water mode costs are estimated at two and one half times the rail mode costs. That relationship will vary depending on the port and rail pairs, but the amounts in the table are good overall approximations of the costs to move loads via the various modes. Note that our focus is on overall incremental costs and exclude costs not affected by the modal decision. Using all of the costs in the above table, the total incremental cost of moving a 40’ container a given distance can be calculated as shown below.

As can be seen in the table, the high setup costs for water mode movements make it uneconomical for the relatively short movements that would be involved in feeding marine containers. For instance, presumably one of the feeder situations Scott was envisioning was discharging in Los Angeles containers that were destined for Oakland, which would then move by feeder ship. The fundamental problem with that is such a feeder move has a higher cost compared to either continuing the mother ship to Oakland or moving the container by truck. The statute road miles from Los Angeles to Oakland are 377 while the water miles are 538. Even if they were equal, it would be more cost efficient to feed the container by truck than by water. This is driven by the setup costs in the water mode representing more than 90% of total costs. Even if the water linehaul costs were one-third lower, the effective impact of foreign flag versus Jones Act container ship costs on an equivalent capacity basis, it is not cost effective compared to feeding the container by truck.

The comparisons above also fail to take into a account the transit time advantages of truck versus rail and rail versus water. Most actual shippers will tell you they need to see a 15% or more freight cost savings before they will seriously consider using a slower transit mode. In addition to the transit time differences inherent in the various modes, the on-time performance and adherence to schedules also generally deteriorates as you go down in speed. This is particularly the case with the water mode which tends to be more susceptible to weather related disruptions. As the Los Angeles to Oakland example above highlighted, the actual distances between two points can be quite different by mode with trucks typically resulting in the shortest straight-line distance. In other words, the even mile comparison in the above table rarely represents actual market conditions. Trucks also typically operate at higher overall capacity utilization rates than the other modes. These two real world differences, which are almost always unfavorable to the slower modes, make the modal gaps even wider than what is in the table.

In summary, the facts above demonstrate that Scott Lincicome’s claim on February 17 that the Jones Act is in some way responsible for the current port congestion is pure sophistry. If he knew more about the economics of container shipping, he would recognize just how off base he is with that observation. His colleague Colin Grabow certainly does know better from the many emails I sent him on basic facts about container shipping and transport costs. That of course was when I initially thought he was an actual think tank researcher rather than a lobbyist uninterested in the facts and simply promoting an agenda. The Jones Act is no more responsible for port congestion than it is for Manhattan traffic jams, a linkage Cato made in billboards it rented a few years ago. If you’re getting the impression that as it relates to the Jones Act, Cato Institute is short on research, facts and the truthfulness most of us associate with think tanks while being long on marketing, repetitive falsehoods and generally spreading balderdash, I believe you have a keen understanding of their agenda here.

With the numbers laid out showing just how preposterous linking the Jones Act to port congestion is, I challenge Cato Institute to highlight any errors that would backup their recent claim. Such a challenge would result in an immediate response from a research-driven think tank that knew its subject and whose statement was just the tip of an iceberg of facts and knowledge. But that is not the case here. My challenge will go unanswered, as there is no reservoir of facts and knowledge. They will move on to their next drive by slam against the Jones Act, motivated solely by what sounds plausible. They will keep trying to fly a kite without a tail because that is what they have been tasked to do.

The second preposterous claim comes from the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii (GIH) folk. Their website says they are a research think tank, but that aspect in any credible sense of what that term means can’t be seen in the 2020 “report” they commissioned related to the Jones Act that they continue to promote. Not surprisingly, the GIH website lists Colin Grabow of Cato Institute as a Grassroot Scholar in one example of the echo chamber of misinformation that has developed on the Jones Act.

Prior to getting to the 2020 report and the unique claim they made to me in justifying it, some background is in order. I was familiar with the consultant who wrote it because he had previously authored another report on the Jones Act claiming to measure the impact on Puerto Rico. That report was unveiled at a Cato Institute conference held at its DC headquarters in May 2019. The report concluded that the Jones Act raised Puerto Rico’s shipping costs by at least $571 million annually. Digging into the report, I found that it was based on a flawed apples-to-oranges methodology and even with that was replete with logic and math errors. Included in the latter were distances between ports that were up to 64% in error. Needless to say, such basic errors that factor into the conclusion are hardly confidence building for any report. In any case, I went through the report methodically correcting the logic and math errors and demonstrated that the Jones Act impact could be no more than one-fifth of the ludicrous $571 million figure. My observations along with a detailed worksheet were provided to Cato Institute a week after their conference.

Given the clear errors in the 2019 report on Puerto Rico, I was somewhat surprised to see some fifteen months later that the same consultant was used for the 2020 report on Hawaii. Presumably Colin’s familiarity with his work played a role in recommending him to GIH. The 56-page report was released with lots of fanfare at a July 29, 2020 webinar hosted by GIH with Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Congressman Ed Case of Hawaii in attendance. The press release headline and the focus of the webinar were that this new study concluded the Jones Act costs Hawaii $1.2 billion annually. I participated in the webinar and while I hadn’t yet fully read the study, I did know something about the size of the Hawaii Jones Act market. During the Q&A segment, my question directed at Congressman Case (Senator Lee left prior to the Q&A session) was as follows: “The claimed $1.2 billion annual cost is more than total Hawaii Jones Act revenue. Given that large majority of costs are unaffected by Jones Act, how is that possible?” His response was that “He wasn’t going to dig into numbers”. Not a real response to the question, but nevertheless a political and even clever response. My preference, however, is for people who dig into and actually understand the relevant numbers before they take a position.

And so I dug. As it would turn out, this “study” would make the earlier one on Puerto Rico look like a piker in terms of its exaggeration on the impact of the Jones Act. The same flawed methodology replete with multiple factual errors was used. Because the writer knew nothing about the size of Hawaii market, he makes use of macroeconomic databases that he purports allow him to determine the market size. This convoluted approach resulted in assuming a container shipping market more than twice its actual size and inventing a bulk shipping market that doesn’t even exist. Those egregious mistakes were among the factual, data and logic errors that factor into the baseless conclusion of the study. Upon reading and analyzing the entire report in detail, I viewed its conclusions as meaningless and little more than a number salad tossed against a wall. Indeed, it was simply one of the shoddiest examples of something purporting to be factual research that I’d ever come across.

With the amount of time I’d spent analyzing it, I put together a 14-page 6200-word critique with accompanying worksheets outlining the flawed methodology and factual errors in the study that I sent to GIH on August 6, one week after their webinar. Correcting for these inaccuracies, I came up with a total Jones Act impact in Hawaii ranging from $136 million to $168 million per year that was detailed in my email to GIH accompanied by an attached worksheet.

On August 13, I received the following response from GIH: “I just want to update you that our team is still looking through your critique and would like to respond soon. On a personal note, I want to thank you for taking the time to provide such a thoughtful response. However, I will need a few more days to process and understand all 14 pages of material, and the included spreadsheet, so it will take a bit more time to get back to you, perhaps by early next week. Thank you for your patience.”

They finally responded on August 20 and basically reaffirmed the $1.2 billion without addressing key points I laid out in detail, suggesting that any misunderstanding was on my part and that I might not be familiar with the IMPLAN data sources they used in their modeling. The operative paragraph that jumped off the page to me was as follows: “In total, about $9 billion worth of bulk products like oil and sand come from the United States. We believe that more would move from the mainland if more qualified vessels were available. The cost differential here represents what the cost would be if an international market-based bulk carrier were moving these products from the mainland rather than, say, a U.S. barge.”

What is interesting about that disclosure is the same email referred to $900 million of oil moving each year. Putting aside that amount is twice what a credible government source shows it to be, that leaves at least $8.1 billion of sand moving from the mainland each year. Let me be clear. Such a movement is a figment of their modeling imagination and simply doesn’t exist in the real world. Yet, as per their “study”, excess Jones Act costs related to bulk cargo movements represent $399 annually or one-third of their total $1.2 billion claim. That is just one tangible example of the flaws embedded in a mortally inaccurate effort with factual, data and logic errors that render it meaningless. Correcting for these errors, you are left with a cost impact that is barely one-tenth of what they claim.

My response to GIH noted that they hadn’t addressed any of my key points, re-emphasizing several of those including the overstatement of the container market, and underscored the absurdity of the explanation related to the phantom sand movement. An additional worksheet laying out those items was attached. Not surprisingly, there has been no response from GIH to my August 25 email. Having not heard from them a month later and seeing that they still had the “study” available on their website, it seemed clear that by then they had to know it contained materially false and misleading information but that they still intended to promote it. How much of this resulted from a complete ignorance of the Hawaii Jones Act trade was unclear. In my September 22 email, my final suggestion to GIH was that if they really believed hundreds of ships are involved in moving California sand to Hawaii, then they should look into how those same ships can move Hawaii sand to California. That would seem to be a task worthy of GIH’s keen insight into the Hawaii Jones Act market.

In my view, such mockery is appropriate for an organization purporting to be a research think tank that creates such an egregiously shoddy report to begin with and then upon being made aware in detail of its shortcomings continues to peddle it. The ridiculous explanation of the phantom sand movement, while certainly providing humorous relief, is testimony to how reckless certain Jones Act critics are with facts. They don’t care about them, as theirs is a one way agenda of beating the tambourine against the Jones Act. They are I believe aggressively channeling what Mark Twain said about lies, damned lies and statistics.

The third preposterous claim is the most jaw-dropping exaggeration of all of the impact of the Jones Act. The initial source was a tangential reference in a paper from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Paris based intergovernmental economic entity comprised of most western economies including the U.S. The Jones Act itself was not the subject of the report. Indeed, there was no involvement at all in the report by the OECD person who focuses most on the shipping and transportation sector.

In April 2019, OECD published a 41-page paper that was titled “Local Content Requirements and Their Economic Effect on Shipbuilding”. It looked at the shipbuilding industries in Brazil and the U.S. with a clear focus on the impact on those industries if local content policies were abolished. The first and larger part of the report was on Brazil. In the case of the U.S., one of the local content policies they referred to was the Jones Act. The paper suggested that in a hypothetical repeal of the Jones Act, U.S. shipyards would reduce prices by at least 50% to converge to international levels to stay competitive.

The hypothetical scenario outlined by OECD was that such a price decrease could be expected to sharply increase demand for U.S. built ships, which according to the paper would begin a virtuous circle of benefits for the shipbuilding industry, users of transportation services and the economy as a whole. Included in the latter was a single tangential reference that without the Jones Act, total U.S. economic output is likely to increase between $40 billion and $135 billion annually. There is no detail on these claimed benefits other that they came from simulations involving models and include the elasticity impact and knock on effect from the initial changes. In other words, its very black box with no real information disclosed in terms of what is in the increased output.

But that one sentence reference in a paper that was really about something else was sufficient to kick Cato into action. Naturally the range was dropped and peppered into various presentations was that the OECD says that U.S. economic output would increase $135 billion annually without the Jones Act. That’s certainly an eye-catching figure and most hearing it would infer that was the shipping cost burden resulting from the law. Cato wouldn’t need to say more, and actually saying more in terms of the one sentence reference, the range, the fact it is mainly measuring shipbuilding activity and that itself is based on oblique and unsupportable assumptions all dilute the impact of the headline. And if there is one thing Cato knows how to market well, its out of context figures on the Jones Act expressed in terms of 128 character bursts. I first became aware of the OECD paper when a November 4, 2019 editorial in the Wall Street Journal referred to the headline number. That led me to access and study the paper. It was abundantly clear that the conclusion related to the Jones Act was grossly inaccurate with hypothetical assumptions that simply have no basis in reality.

From an initial review of the paper, it was obvious that the specific U.S. facts collide with whatever is embedded in the black box model used to develop the numbers in the OCED paper. First, the catalyst setting everything in motion that the U.S. shipyards will reduce prices by 50% shows no awareness of the financial results of that industry and assumes profit margins must be above 50%. Without the latter, which no U.S. shipyard has or comes near, any yard that did as OECD anticipated and cut pricing in half would experience a large loss for each ship it built. With my experience in building multiple Jones Act vessels, I’ve yet to encounter a shipyard that will sign a contract at a price guaranteed to result in a loss. So the shipbuilding facts in the U.S. don’t align with this key predicate in the OECD paper. The paper also assumed that with no Jones Act, shipping rates would also come down 50%. That bears no relationship to actual costs in container shipping comprising most of the Jones Act where the majority of the cost has nothing to do with the ship and are unaffected by the Jones Act. Similarly, the largest ship cost related to fuel is unaffected by the Jones Act. Just those two assumptions of cutting shipyard prices and shipping rates in half, neither of which are possible or have any grounding in reality, were key inputs that would render any output from the model meaningless.

I contacted the author and some dozen email exchanges ensued. I initially learned that the senior OECD person who focuses on shipping was not involved in any way with the report and the author was a junior person who had been at OECD for just a few years out of college. From the questions I was asked about intra U.S. trade elasticity and U.S. transport cost by mode and distance, it was clear that these specific U.S. facts had not been known or incorporated into any of the numbers included in the report. It appeared that the $40 billion to $135 billion range referenced in the report had resulted in inquiries and a separate project was now being undertaken to provide backup for that initial effort.

In several extensive emails, I shared with the author previous analyses I had written on the Jones Act impact in Puerto Rico and other markets. I indicated that I assessed the overall direct cost impact as equivalent to 16.5% of Jones Act annual revenue which I pegged at $2.7 billion, working out to $455 million. It was obvious that the model must assume significant elasticity and flow through benefits on top of everything else. This is where specific knowledge related to the Jones Act markets along with transport costs in the U.S. is required. I shared with the author information on cost per unit mile across modes in the U.S. and my view that elasticity from changes in the Jones Act is almost non-existent. That conclusion was based on the consumption nature of present cargo, container shipping costs not involving the ship and the efficiency of U.S. road and rail networks. I highlighted that the short distances and high setup costs at each end precluded any significant modal shift of domestic cargo from road or rail to water, although not in as elaborate detail as in the earlier part of this article. I debunked any notion that the Jones Act is the only thing standing in the way of massive additional movements of containers in new domestic lanes based on the facts as they actually exist in the U.S. now.

As to a reduction in rates generating additional activity in the current Jones Act lanes, the basic consumption nature of most of the cargo moving today makes them highly inelastic. If rates go down 16.5%, the impact on the retail price of goods is minor as existing rates just represent a moderate single digit percent of the value of the cargo being moved. It simply isn’t rational to think that people in Puerto Rico or Hawaii will eat more food or buy more clothes based on what would be a very small change in the cost of those products. I expressed the view that given the specific U.S. facts, the only impact that can be verified would be the direct cost savings in ship crewing and construction costs. I noted that the claim of $135 billion annually is hundreds of times more than the $445 million that can be justified based on verifiable facts.

I stayed in touch with the author through mid-2020, responding and sending information as requested on various transportation distance tables and sharing other Jones Act related analyses. Whatever interest the author may have had in buttressing the $135 billion claim dissipated and the OECD has issued no subsequent report or clarification on the impact of a hypothetical Jones Act repeal on U.S. economic impact. I would learn that the author of the paper left OECD and is now studying for a graduate degree at a French university.

In fairness to OECD, I saw no guile in their tangential reference to the Jones Act impact in a paper that was clearly not focused on that topic. In addition, just the more than three to one range in their estimate underscores that it wasn’t a particular focus and hadn’t been subject to the further review that would have occurred if that was the case. Indeed, as they looked more into it based on my inquiries and presumably inquiries from others pushing in another direction, OECD seemed to back away and recognize there was actually no real backup to support that estimate. Cato Institute, on the other hand, grabbed this out of context information and weaponized it to push their agenda. Unlike the author of the OECD paper who knew nothing about the Jones Act initially and therefore wouldn’t have realized how ludicrous the $135 billion figure was, Cato by that time knew enough to recognize the absurdity of such a number. And yet they knowingly pushed it, leveraging on the creditability of an organization like OECD.

OECD may have backed away, but the paper with its one sentence reference to a $40 billion to $135 billion increase in economic output without the Jones Act still exists. Cato continues to peddle the high number. It popped up most recently in a September 2, 2021 podcast by Steve Forbes for his magazine where he stated “a study from the OECD declared that torpedoing this law would add $135 billion dollars to America’s economic output”. That was one in a series of misstatements that I believe were fed to Steve Forbes by media savvy Jones Act critics. So why did someone like Steve Forbes say things that were so demonstratively false? Because he was provided information from think tanks that he viewed as credible sources. The likelihood that he might be philosophically opposed to the Jones Act at any additional economic cost probably made it easier for him to be victim to lobbyists masquerading as academic researchers.

In any case, in countering the Forbes podcast, I updated my Jones Act market size estimate along with the latest applicable direct cost factor. At $4 billion in annual revenue, which is likely a bit on the high side, applying a 16.7% factor results in an annual cost of $668 million. The $135 billion claim is 202 times that amount and is complete and total nonsense.

So those are three of the most preposterous Jones Act linkages created out of thin air by Cato Institutes and its acolytes. A linkage to port congestion that doesn’t exist, a report overstating the Hawaii impact by a factor of ten with the incremental cost of ships that don’t exist and the weaponization of an out of context unsubstantiated claim that overstates the overall economic impact by a factor of 200. As audacious as those claims are, there is nothing to say that there won’t be even more nonsensical linkages in the future. In an article earlier this month in the Washington Examiner where Colin Grabow was extensively quoted on how Russia benefits from the Jones Act, it was led with a graphic picture. The vile cartoon showed a military uniform clad Putin sitting on oil barrels and waiving a copy of the Jones Act at a cowering Uncle Sam. Perhaps media savvy Colin is test marketing what may soon be a message blaming the Jones Act for Russia invading Ukraine. That’s a striking assertion for me to make and goes against a southern upbringing that by nature is non-adversarial. My tendency is to assume that everyone operates in good faith based on the facts at hand and they aren’t motivated by hidden agendas. But when people repeatedly show by their actions that is not the case, adjustments to that view are in order.

What’s remarkable to me is that these two and three digit distortions come in the economic areas that are supposedly the strength of these think tanks. As a general rule of thumb, my view is that folk whose numbers are consistently off by a factor of 10 or more don’t know what they are talking about. Whether its incompetence or lack of integrity may be a useful side note, but the key takeaway is that they shouldn’t be paid attention to. When this occurs in their area of supposed expertise, that hardly lends to having confidence in what they may say outside that area. That’s what I think of when Colin and other Jones Act critics opine on the national security aspects of the Jones Act and our merchant marine. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain something that the facts from WWII to today and what is going on in Eastern Europe should make obvious to them. They should read the 2016 book “The Matthews Men” as a refresher on what it is they are working to tear down. Unfortunately, Colin has showed little to no respect for our merchant mariners in his Twitter screeds. He likes to take a classic WWII merchant marine recruiting poster and alter it to say things those mariners would never have said as it is his own fabrications. That is just one of many aspects of the fact light but marketing/public relations heavy campaign targeting the Jones Act, as if they were selling potato chips. But this isn’t about potato chips; it’s about so much more. I find the efforts of Colin and the band of think tankers that have joined his campaign to be reprehensible and despicable. They peddle balderdash. And it’s made worse because they are doing it to carry water for folks that are funding them. I believe they along with the people funding them should all be ashamed of themselves.

With regard to funding, the time has come when there needs to be some disclosure on five and six figure donations and more to think tanks, particularly when it involves corporations. I’m not suggesting that it be limited, but a loophole exists allowing corporations to hire an effective lobbyist while skirting rules intended to disclose that fact. One can clearly see the efficacy from a corporation’s standpoint of hiring a lobbyist wearing research think tank clothing, but policy makers and the public have a right to know who is carrying water for who. I call on federal legislators and their staffs to consider new legislation that would require some sort of disclosure on major donations to DC based think tanks that may be aimed at influencing policy makers and even changing laws such as the Jones Act.

As I close this essay, I find myself thinking of something that a friend of mine from my home state of Alabama once told me. His family was involved in the timber farming business and his father’s experience had resulted in a view that representatives of the company’s buying timber played fast and loose with the facts and the truth. My friend recalled that when he was 18 years old and becoming more involved in the family business, his father sat him down and said, “Son, when ever anybody with sawdust comes by the house, don’t you believe a word he says”. That’s the way I now think about Cato Institute and its acolytes when they talk about the Jones Act. On that topic, what they say is driven by lies, damned lies and statistics.