The Foreign Dredge Act is an older cousin to the more well-known and infamous Jones Act, which bans foreign-built ships from moving goods between American ports. As a result, it drives up shipping prices to places to Puerto Rico and Hawaii, adds traffic to American highways, and leaves sizable parts of the country without access to natural gas.
Like the Jones Act, the Foreign Dredge Act is a purely protectionist law that forbids foreign-built dredges—vessels built to remove debris from waterways and to deepen and widen shipping channels—from operating in the U.S. Any foreign dredge caught doing work in American waters is subject to immediate forfeiture.
Also reflecting on the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge is Allison Schrager.
As Summers, the Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, noted on X, formerly Twitter, “Pre-1983, mortgage costs were in the CPI as were car payments pre-1998. Now, price indexes do not include borrowing costs. Thus, when interest rates jumped last year, official inflation did not fully capture the effects it would have on consumer well-being.”
Indeed, if we measured inflation as we did in the 1970s, the inflation that started in 2021 would have peaked at 18 percent—double its reported peak. That’s higher than the worst of the 1970 and ’80s. Inflation’s current annual rate would be about 8 percent.
Cato’s Chris Edwards decries “Biden’s corporate welfare bonanza.”
Jon Miltimore writes insightfully about Canada, incentives, and Robocop.
David Henderson remembers the late Daniel Kahneman.
Jeffrey Singer looks back 25 years to the murder conviction of Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
