Will the Jones Act get repealed in its entirety and not immediately replaced by something identical?
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There ought to be a congressional office for economic analysis which, for every line item on every bill, evaluates whether it is net positive or net negative for the general welfare (real individual income per capita) over the long term. Stuff like this which is so obviously net-negative regulatory capture would always get the lowest possible score from that office.
@JonathanRay Suppose it gets created. Option one is it has no real effect on lawmaking or public opinion (I think this is the most likely given that plenty of nonprofits do this already.) Option two is it has a worthwhile effect, in which case it becomes part of the partisan strategy to staff the place with the party's loyal minions to tilt the scales for the party's proposals and relentlessly dog the hated opposition's perfidious and financially unsound ideas. Either way it helps not at all.
Oh and regulatory capture here too, obviously. Big time.
@AndrewHartman There are limits to how much they can distort it. The CBO that exists is better than no CBO. Most of the problem is not-raising-the-question-in-the-first-place. The other half of the problem is aggregating things into gigantic omnibus bills to give politicians plausible deniability around voting for infamous special interest rentseeking. A rule requiring more disaggregation would be good. A line-item veto would be good. A way for 33% of congress to force a role call vote on each line item would be good.
It's existed long enough to completely reshape the transport of goods in the US. By now, it's not only supported by the mariners it keeps employed, but also by the other industries (like trucking) that don't want to compete with reasonably priced cabotage.
When a law or regulation has this much special interest support and virtually no one in the public has heard of it, it's about as invincible as anything in American politics can be.
@AndrewHartman this suggests that self-driving trucks might help push it by reducing the number of people who rely on it for rent extraction.