Another Jones Act Absurdity

By Colin Grabow

Cape Ray

As North Carolina grapples with the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, transportation officials in the state are attempting to secure the use of a U.S. government-owned vessel, the Cape Ray, to transport supplies to the port of Wilmington. With the city temporarily transformed into an island by recent flooding, the roll-on, roll-off ship—or “ro-ro” in maritime parlance—will enable trucks filled with needed goods to drive aboard.

It’s a good thing the ship is government-owned—under private ownership the Cape Ray’s provision of relief supplies would be illegal. This absurd situation is due to a nearly 100-year-old law called the Jones Act. Passed in 1920, the law mandates that ships transporting goods between two points in the United States be U.S.-owned, crewed, flagged and built. The Cape Ray, however, was built in Japan.

Even if officials sought the private sector’s help and a Jones Act-compliant ro-ro ship to transport the trucks, none are available. According to data from the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) there are only seven ro-ro ships in the entire Jones Act fleet. The closest one to North Carolina, the Delta Mariner, isn’t even an ocean-going vessel but rather operates on the Tennessee River. The other six vessels ply routes between the West Coast and Alaska or Hawaii.

The picture is little improved if Jones Act containerships and general cargo ships are also included, with a total of six such vessels currently on the East or Gulf Coasts (MARAD shows five but does not include the recently commissioned El Coquí). The closest one to the North Carolina flood victims is a 47-year-old general cargo ship, the Coastal Venture, which is currently moored near Charleston.

One reason behind the dearth of ships is the fact that U.S.-built vessels cost up to eight times as much as those built overseas. Such exorbitant prices mean that fewer are purchased, with fewer available for both general commerce and emergency situations. 

In contrast, there is little difficulty locating foreign-flagged ro-ro vessels in the mid-Atlantic region. The Marshall Islands-flagged Morning Pride, for example, is making its way up the East Coast toward Philadelphia, while the Norwegian-flagged Höegh Asia is bound for Baltimore. A combination cargo/ro-ro vessel, the Saudi-flagged Bahri Tabuk, is currently off the coast of North Carolina.

But because of the Jones Act, none of these ships are eligible to take on relief supplies at a U.S. port and speed them to Wilmington.

The Jones Act’s stated purpose is to ensure that the United States “shall have a merchant marine of the best equipped and most suitable types of vessels sufficient to carry the greater portion of its commerce and serve as a naval or military auxiliary in time of war or national emergency.” But when faced with a genuine emergency, such as Hurricane Maria in 2017 or Hurricane Florence today, the Jones Act fleet is often found wanting.

By its own terms, the law is a failure that actually impedes the realization of its goals. It’s time for the Jones Act to go. 

Topics:
General, Trade Policy

HUD’s Inexperienced Bureaucrats

By Chris Edwards

The Washington Post slammed Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development today. The paper found that “loyalty eclipses expertise” in the upper ranks of the agency given that 24 of HUD’s 70 political appointees have little housing experience. Most of the 24 helped on either Trump’s or Carson’s presidential campaigns.

A few thoughts.

Washington is a revolving door of analysts and operatives moving back and forth between trade associations and businesses (when their team is out) and executive branch agencies (when their team is in). Arguably, Carson’s policy of bringing non-housing outsiders into HUD is consistent with Trump’s “drain the swamp” promise. After all, when industry insiders are appointed to federal jobs, their incentive is to steer subsidies and bend regulations toward their industry friends on the outside.

The Post argues that Obama’s HUD appointees were more expert than Trump’s. Maybe so, but as small government supporters in Washington know, a great policy asymmetry is that most of the experts on government welfare programs are the liberals and lobbyists who favor the expansive status quo. That is one reason why Washington is a self-sustaining and self-protecting ecosystem so difficult to cut.

All that said, in 2015 I also critiqued federal political appointees as amateurs who have a problematic incentive structure:

The federal executive branch is headed by an elected president who appoints about 3,000 people to top positions across the bureaucracy. Political leadership of federal agencies has some benefits, but it also causes failures. New administrations come into office eager to launch new initiatives, but they are less interested in managing what is already there. Political appointees think that they know all the answers, so they do not bother learning the lessons from past efforts, and they repeat mistakes. As each administration yanks agencies in new directions, past investments are thrown down the drain. The average tenure of federal political appointees is short—just two and half years—and so appointees tend to push superficially appealing initiatives that look good on their resumes, but they shy away from tackling longer-term, structural reforms. 

Another problem with appointees is that many of them are political partisans who lack management or technical experience. One of the reasons for the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was that many executives in the Department of Homeland Security were inexperienced party loyalists. This lesson from Katrina has not been learned. Today, for example, many U.S. ambassadors are political donors with no experience in the countries they are posted. Another example is the current acting head of the 900-employee Federal Railroad Administration, who seems to have no background in railroads or transportation, or apparently any technical qualifications. The ticket to the top for this official appears to have been a decade of media relations jobs for members of Congress and the White House.

That is the executive branch. As for the legislative branch, inexperience is an even larger problem. Most members of Congress and their staffs have little knowledge of the complexities of the industries that they subsidize, penalize, and tax. The modern Congress is a bunch of lawyers squabbling over how to manipulate a $20 trillion economy that they do not understand.

The basic problem with the federal government is that it is too big. The problem with HUD is that officials in a faraway capital are trying to micromanage local communities, not that some HUD officials were former event managers and HVAC salesmen.

For more on executive branch failings, see this study.

For more on legislative branch failings, see this study.

For an overall analysis of federal failure, see this study.

Topics:
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

“Fort Trump” and Mounting U.S. Tensions with Russia

By Ted Galen Carpenter

Washington’s relations with Russia have been deteriorating for years, but new U.S. actions could make matters considerably worse.  One major source of irritation for the Kremlin has been NATO’s military exercises in countries on Russia’s border.  Those war games have proliferated since the onset of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, when the United States and European Union countries helped demonstrators oust Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and Russia responded by annexing Crimea.

Russian anger also has been directed at “rotational” U.S. military deployments in NATO’s easternmost members.  Those supposedly temporary assignments of American units have become nearly continuous.  Now there are indications that the Trump administration may dispense entirely with the diplomatic fiction that sequential rotational deployments do not constitute a permanent U.S. military presence.

During a state visit to Washington in mid-September, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, promised to provide $2 billion toward construction costs if the United States built a military base in his country.  In a transparent appeal to the U.S. president’s notorious vanity, Duda even offered to name the base “Fort Trump.”  Poland “is willing to make a very major contribution to the United States to come in and have a presence in Poland,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “If they’re willing to do that, it’s something we will certainly talk about.”  He added that the United States would take Duda’s proposal “very seriously.”

American Conservative columnist Daniel Larison warned that putting a U.S. base in Poland “would further antagonize Russia, and it would create one more overseas military installation that the U.S. doesn’t need to have.  Trump is often accused of wanting to ‘retreat’ from the world, but his willingness to entertain this proposal shows that he doesn’t care about stationing U.S. forces abroad so long as someone else is footing most of the bill.”  The cost issue would be the least of the problems created by establishing a permanent U.S. military presence in a country bordering on Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave.  The rotational deployments are bad enough, but ostentatiously building a major base would escalate that provocation.

As I discuss in a recent article in the American Conservative, Washington’s growing military ties with Ukraine, a country that is an even more central security concern for Moscow, constitute an especially provocative move.  Secretary of Defense James Mattis has acknowledged that U.S. instructors are training Ukrainian military units at a base in western Ukraine.  Washington also approved two important arms sales to Kiev’s ground forces in just the past 9 months.  The more recent deal included the extremely lethal Javelin antitank missiles—the kind of weapons that Barack Obama’s administration had prudently declined to send to Kiev.

Potentially even more worrisome, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker disclosed during a September first interview with the Guardian that Washington’s future military sales to Kiev would likely involve weapons for Ukraine’s air force and navy as well as the army. “The Javelins are mainly symbolic and it’s not clear if they would ever be used,” Aric Toler, a research scholar at the staunchly pro-NATO and anti-Russia Atlantic Council, asserted.  One could well dispute his sanguine conclusion, but even Toler conceded:  “Support for the Ukrainian navy and air defence would be a big deal.  That would be far more significant.”

Relations with Russia already are bad enough without pouring gasoline on the fire.  Unfortunately, the Trump administration is doing exactly that.  Perhaps the president is embracing these provocative initiatives to rebut hysterical critics who charge that he is “soft” on Russia—or even worse, is a Russian agent.  Whatever the motive, Washington’s recent actions are reckless and need to be abandoned.

 

 

Topics:
Foreign Policy and National Security

China Decides To Lower Some Tariffs

By Simon Lester and Huan Zhu

Yesterday morning, in an op-ed we published in a Chinese news outlet, we made the case that assuaging the Trump administration will be difficult, and that instead of responding to Trump, China should just focus on being a good citizen of the world trading system. In this context, we said this:

China should unilaterally open up its markets to the greatest extent possible, as a sign of its good faith … includ[ing] tariff reductions.

Later in the day, we saw this Bloomberg story:

China is planning to cut average tariff rates on imports from the majority of its trading partners as soon as next month, two people familiar with the matter said, in a move that would lower costs for consumers as a trade war with the U.S. deepens.

The two people asked not to be named because the matter isn’t public yet. Premier Li Keqiang said Wednesday that China would reduce tariffs, though he didn’t elaborate. 

It’s not yet clear how the planned reduction would affect imports from the U.S., if at all, including Chinese retaliatory tariffs on American products amid the trade war. Those details may only emerge once the government outlines which products will enjoy lower tariffs. …

Now, we’re not claiming cause and effect here, but we’re thinking of making some more requests!

But seriously, we think it is pretty unlikely that our piece led to the Chinese government’s decision here. Nevertheless, this is a positive development. It is helpful that China is recognizing that liberalization is beneficial, and that as a major world economy, it needs to lead by example when it calls itself a defender of “the principles of free trade and the multilateral trading system.”  China has a long way to go to become a true market economy, but this is a good step.

Topics:
Trade Policy

A Contemporary Economist’s Account of the “Crowning Folly of Tariff of 1930”

By Alan Reynolds

“[T]here came another folly of government intervention in 1930 transcending all the rest in significance. In a world staggering under a load of international debt which could be carried only if countries under pressure could produce goods and export them to their creditors, we, the great creditor nation of the world, with tariffs already far too high, raised our tariffs again. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of June 1930 was the crowning folly of the who period from 1920 to 1933….

Protectionism ran wild all over the world.  Markets were cut off.  Trade lines were narrowed.  Unemployment in the export industries all over the world grew with great rapidity, and the prices of export commodities, notably farm commodities in the United States, dropped with ominous rapidity….

The dangers of this measure were so well understood in financial circles that, up to the very last, the New York financial district retained hope the President Hoover would veto the tariff bill.  But late on Sunday, June 15, it was announced that he would sign the bill. This was headline news Monday morning. The stock market broke twelve points in the New York Time averages that day and the industrials broke nearly twenty points. The market, not the President, was right.”

– Dr. Benjamin M. Anderson [chief economist at Chase National Bank 1920-39], Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946 (Indianapolis, Liberty Press, 1979, pp. 229-230)

Topics:
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics, International Economics, Development & Immigration, Tax and Budget Policy, Trade Policy

Cost and Abuse Problems in Low-Income Housing

By Chris Edwards

A new Government Accountability Office report on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit echoes some of the concerns expressed in this 2017 Cato report. Vanessa Brown Calder and I suggested that the $9 billion program was vulnerable to abuse and that the costs of projects may be inflated.

Under the program, the IRS hands out tax credits to state agencies, which in turn give them to favored developers. We argued that the program had little oversight and that developers and contractors may inflate their claimed costs.

The GAO found that “no federal agency monitors or assesses LIHTC development costs, which are key to evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of the tax credit program.” At the state and local levels, “few agencies have requirements to help guard against misrepresentation of contractor costs (a known fraud risk).” Because the IRS and many state agencies do not require detailed cost certifications, “the vulnerability of the LIHTC program to this fraud risk is heightened.”

The GAO compared the costs of 1,849 projects in 12 jurisdictions. They found a wide variation, as shown in the chart below.

Whether it is taxes, gasoline, or housing, everything seems to cost much more in California than Texas. The cost of low-income housing units are two and half times higher in the Golden State than in the Lone Star State. GAO found that both the hard costs of construction and the soft costs (such as architect fees) were much higher in the former than the latter.

The median per-unit cost of the new construction LIHTC projects was $218,000, of which the land cost was just $9,400. I’m not an expert, but that seems high given that you can buy a really nice tiny house for $80,000 or so.

Vanessa and I call for repeal of the LIHTC program.

To tackle housing affordability, she has suggested a deregulatory approach, which was recently embraced by HUD secretary Ben Carson.

Topics:
General, Regulatory Studies

Affordable Housing: Hard Way and Easy Way

By Chris Edwards

A new GAO study examines the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which is a complex government program aimed at increasing the supply of affordable housing.

How complex is it? Vanessa Brown Calder and I noted that one LIHTC guidebook is 1,400 pages long.  

The LIHTC is a classic government solution to a problem. It is complicated, raises costs, and is not very effective. Nonetheless, some people favor such approaches. Adam Smith called them “men of system.” 

An easier way to solve problems is to let markets work. This approach leans toward simplicity and low cost. Some efforts may not be effective at first, but through innovation and feedback entrepreneurs eventually nail it. Adam Smith called it the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”

Below, a diagram from the GAO study shows part of the LIHTC process. Little tax credit boxes float around and dollar signs flow to LIHTC investors, which are usually major banks. This is the hard way to increase affordable housing supply.

Below that, I’ve diagrammed the easy way, which is to deregulate, remove the subsidies, and let banks and developers compete in the marketplace.

Affordable Housing: The Hard Way

 

Affordable Housing: The Easy Way

Topics:
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, Regulatory Studies

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