> if I had to pick one policy that was the Platonic ideal of stupid, the thing that has almost zero upside and also has the best ratio of 'amount of damage this is doing to America’ versus ‘reasons why we can’t stop being idiots about this’ there is (so far) a clear winner.
> We must repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906. It says, to paraphrase, no underwater digging - to repair ports, or build bigger ones, or fix waterways - unless the boat doing the digging was built in the US, and is owned and operated by Americans.
…
> The direct cost savings (as in, if we did the current set of jobs cheaper and faster) depends on the current size of the market. If we take the 5% at face value and the 11 billion worldwide size estimate here, and assume roughly 50% cost savings, we get $250 million/year. At a 5% discount rate we can value that at about $5 billion, plus the benefits of getting projects done faster, and doing more projects. Already this seems to be approaching the 1000:1 ratio where economic interventions make sense, but the real benefits are in what you do with the jobs you wouldn’t have otherwise done.
> If the estimate of 1.6 million jobs checks out, we are already talking about single digit costs per job created, which should already compare favorably with third-world interventions even without any of the additional indirect benefits, of which there are many. The impact on inflation could be substantial even within a few years.
> We must repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906. It says, to paraphrase, no underwater digging - to repair ports, or build bigger ones, or fix waterways - unless the boat doing the digging was built in the US, and is owned and operated by Americans.
…
> The direct cost savings (as in, if we did the current set of jobs cheaper and faster) depends on the current size of the market. If we take the 5% at face value and the 11 billion worldwide size estimate here, and assume roughly 50% cost savings, we get $250 million/year. At a 5% discount rate we can value that at about $5 billion, plus the benefits of getting projects done faster, and doing more projects. Already this seems to be approaching the 1000:1 ratio where economic interventions make sense, but the real benefits are in what you do with the jobs you wouldn’t have otherwise done.
> If the estimate of 1.6 million jobs checks out, we are already talking about single digit costs per job created, which should already compare favorably with third-world interventions even without any of the additional indirect benefits, of which there are many. The impact on inflation could be substantial even within a few years.