The Great Jones Act Debate

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Tracy Alloway (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Joe, this is the big one. We are about to ruin our most long running joke, all for this.

Joe Weisenthal (0:30)

What is our next most running joke? Anyway, yes, we are ruining a lot. So we've joked for years and years and years about how we should do an episode on the Jones Act, because it's come up obviously in dozens of episodes. We do actually talk about it quite a bit in different contexts, but we've never done an episode actually talking about the infamous law.

Tracy Alloway (0:51)

That's right. And since we waited so long, I guess, we had to do it a little bit differently.

Joe Weisenthal (0:55)

In style.

Tracy Alloway (0:56)

We had to do it in style. Yep. So for those of us who came to our live event in Washington, DC recently, you will have seen exactly what format we did this in, but it's a debate. So we had someone who is pro Jones Act debating with someone who is anti Jones Act live on stage. Things got heated, things got emotional, but always entertaining and informative.

Joe Weisenthal (1:17)

It was heated. I've joked, people have very strong feelings about the Jones Act. When we did it live on stage, we separated our two guests at the end of the stage, tongue in cheek. But actually, it was really intense and people feel very strongly about this law, which restricts if you're going to ship something from one point in the US to another point in the US by water. It has to be on a US-built and US-crewed and US-flagged ship. People feel very strongly about this law.

Tracy Alloway (1:49)

That's right. It's kind of interesting also to look at it as a little petri dish of industrial policy, which I think is one of the reasons we first started getting interested in this, along with a lot of the supply chain disruptions that we were experiencing around the pandemic time. But our two debaters were Zada Fuentes, the Vice President for Government Affairs at the Transportation Institute, and Colin Grabow, an Associate Director at the Cato Institute's Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. Zada took the pro side and Colin took the anti side. As I said, we had some pretty good arguments on both sides. So take a listen, see if it changes your mind. I'm sure if you're listening to this, you probably already have an opinion, but here we go. Before we start, I got to ask, how many people have heard of the Jones Act here?

Joe Weisenthal (2:42)

Wait, actually, let's just get a temperature of both sides. So shout if you think the Jones Act should be repealed. And shout if you think we should keep the Jones Act.

Tracy Alloway (2:57)

Wow. Shout if you just feel strongly about the Jones Act either way.

Colin Grabow (3:03)

Yeah. All right.

Tracy Alloway (3:04)

Everyone has an opinion.

Colin Grabow (3:05)

Okay.

Tracy Alloway (3:06)

We are giving up on our longest running joke and finally doing the Jones Act episode. We thought we'd do something a little bit special. Instead of just having one guest, we actually have two. It's going to be an Odd Lots debate, someone arguing the pro side and someone on the con side.

Joe Weisenthal (3:21)

That's right. We're not going to formally declare a winner.

Tracy Alloway (3:25)

Everyone's a winner.

Joe Weisenthal (3:26)

They're not formal rules in terms of, you know, there's no mic mute or anything. But we are hoping we are going to have a spirited discussion about this very controversial law. People feel really strongly about this law one way or another. And so we are going to finally, we don't actually do a lot of debates on the show.

Tracy Alloway (3:45)

It's a rule at my house that you can't talk about politics or the Jones Act or crypto at Thanksgiving.

Colin Grabow (3:50)

Okay.

Tracy Alloway (3:51)

So without further ado, we do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Zada Fuentes. She is the vice president for government affairs at the Transportation Institute. And we have Colin Grabow. He is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. So welcome to The Sage, Zada and Colin.

Joe Weisenthal (4:11)

All right. Colin and Sara, thank you so much. We're finally talking the Jones Act. Colin, why don't we start with you? Why should we get rid of the edge? Why did you even agree to come out here and talk about some random shipping law from the early 1900s? And why do you devote time to it and why do you want to kill it?