The Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow reports that “waiver data reveal how the Jones Act blocks American trade.” Three slices:
Since the Trump administration waived the Jones Act on March 17 for energy products, fertilizer, and related inputs, the US Maritime Administration has been publishing voyage-level data on every domestic cargo movement that has utilized the 1920 law’s suspension. We’ve turned that data into an interactive infographic that lets readers explore all 45 voyages completed thus far, including the vessels involved, cargo carried, and ports visited.
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It’s all further confirmation that the law has been suppressing intra-US trade. But that’s just from a higher level. Some of the granular data produced by the waiver provides arguably even more noteworthy insights.
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For an administration committed to “America First” economics, the early results clearly show that the law is not protecting American commerce but blocking it. No wonder the Jones Act’s supporters are so adamant that the waiver go away.
Public choice economist James Buchanan made this point with characteristic clarity. In Democracy in Deficit, co-authored with Richard Wagner, he argued that the most important legacy of John Maynard Keynes was not a specific policy prescription but a shift in fiscal norms. Before the Keynesian revolution, there was a widely held expectation, though imperfectly observed, that governments should balance their budgets over the business cycle, running deficits only in exceptional circumstances. The old Hamiltonian norm. And Keynesian economics, properly understood, also called for deficits in recessions and offsetting restraint or surpluses in expansions. But Buchanan’s and Wagner’s insight was that democratic politics would not implement the symmetry embedded in that prescription. Deficits in downturns are politically attractive; surpluses in good times require tax increases or spending cuts on a satisfied electorate and are therefore systematically avoided. The result is a persistent deficit bias: deficits in recessions, insufficient surpluses in expansions, and a gradual accumulation of debt over time.
Buchanan and Wagner’s conclusion was institutional rather than merely descriptive. Because ordinary political incentives tend to produce this asymmetry, they argued for fiscal rules, such as a balanced-budget requirement, to better align policy with long-run sustainability. The continued growth of large, unfunded commitments in programs such as Social Security and Medicare reflects, in part, the same underlying political dynamics Buchanan and Wagner identified: not a deliberate embrace of permanent deficits as theory, but the predictable outcome of a system in which the discipline required to run surpluses is politically fragile.
But energy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Many data centers are motivated to build out their own energy capacity, which would help insulate nearby residents from price shocks while also ensuring steady supply for themselves. Government can help by getting out of the way of energy producers and embracing an all-of-the-above approach to production.
In Gallup’s poll, 18 percent of data center opponents now cite water usage as a reason they would oppose a data center, but that’s a less defensible worry. Much of the alarm traces to Karen Hao’s 2025 bestseller “Empire of AI,” which claimed a Google data center in Chile could consume more than a thousand times a town’s water supply. That figure is off by a factor of a thousand, due to a unit conversion error Hao later acknowledged.
Jason Sorens busts the myth of an ‘oversupply’ of housing in the U.S.
Michael Strain explains that “the war on billionaires is dangerous nonsense.” A slice:
Moreover, like tech entrepreneurs, hedge-fund managers create value that accrues to all of society. Apart from building projects and tax revenue, firms like Citadel help to ensure that capital is allocated efficiently throughout the economy, which ultimately makes workers throughout the entire economy more productive, increasing their wages and living standards.
Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Daniela Vidart:
This paper examines correspondence education as an alternative educational pathway in early 20th-century America. Using newly digitized records from the International Correspondence Schools—the largest such institution, with over 4 million students by 1940—linked to census data, I show that enrollment increased the likelihood of skilled employment by 6-10pp within 3-10 years, particularly among younger students who used it as a substitute for high school. I develop a general equilibrium Roy-style model where individuals sort into educational options by ability. Consistent with the model, correspondence education facilitated skill acquisition for lower-ability individuals and improved selection into high school, amplifying its returns.
[DBx: Note that the International Correspondence Schools were private, for-profit enterprises and, thus, they are an historical example of how private-sector entrepreneurs supplied valuable education.]
