[TexasGator]

How would better dredges help remove the wreckage?

[BenLurkin]

White House had given a "clear directive" to "tear down any barriers, bureaucratic as well as financial."

Translation: The Democrat Party is eager to violate the law and waste enormous amounts of taxpayer funds in order to use this crisis to give the Party more power.

[HYPOCRACY]

If anybody believes this mess will get cleaned up before next year, I have a slightly broken bridge to sell you.

[laxcoach]

While I disagree with these types of laws, the idea that they will slow efforts is silly.

First, they need to remove wreckage from the channel. Then they *may* need to dredge a portion of the channel. But I guarantee there are already dredges throughout the Bay.

It seems odd to me that someone would entertain writing this article, let alone publishing it.

[Alberta's Child]

I call B.S. on this.

The Jones Act and Foreign Dredge Act were established as national defense measures. The national security exposure the U.S. would face with foreign vessels and foreign crews operating in the country’s domestic waterways is obvious, and anyone in the media who doesn’t recognize this is either a moron or has a globalist agenda.

I would point out that these laws were passed before the U.S. had any states outside the contiguous area now defined as the Lower 48 states. I have long advocated some changes to these laws to provide exemptions for vessels that make port calls in states and territories that are separated from the U.S. mainland by open seas, but that’s the extent of what I’d be willing to change.

[butlerweave]

Cost just doubled or quadrupled

[Carry_Okie]

Waiving the Foreign Dredge Act now might help in some small way—perhaps better dredges can be brought in from Canada or somewhere else nearby—but the collapse of the Key Bridge is a great reminder that we shouldn't wait until there's a crisis to start undoing bad laws.

The "bad laws" at operation here are the regulations that make ship-building in the United States uneconomic.

[Does so]

Since there’s a question of Francis Scott Key having owned slaves, the bridge will likely be renamed.

I see “The George Floyd Bridge” in the running. Maybe Joe Biden, since he’d actually taken a train over it?

[coloradan]

Before any rash actions are taken in the port, of course the first priority would be an extensive survey of the seabed floor to make sure no endangered species, including any possibly new species, would be impacted by recovery abd rebuilding operations. This process should only take a decade, at most. Concurrently, all entities planning to be with 10 miles of the port can file environmental, climate impact, and diversity/equity/inclusion statments detailing carbon emissions and how the white cisgender patriarchy is going to be dismantled by their activities.

[Phlyer]

The real problem is not the Foreign Dredge act, or the Jones act. Those are symptoms of non-competitive US practices.

What makes them non-competitive? Minimum wage laws or their equivalent in the form of requiring companies to use only union labor or at least pay union-level wages. If pay were tied to value added rather than being set arbitrarily by people who never needed to make a payroll in their lives, then US workers - who truly are very competitive in productivity - would not need artificial boundaries to foreign competition.

However, it would take more than just reducing/eliminating minimum wage laws. Shipping is so efficient that it's cheaper to pay slave wages in China and ship the resulting products half way around the world than to pay a 'reasonable' wage in this country. So what do we do? Allow slave wage "sweatshops" in this country, or prop up wages so that, by-and-large, US citizens could expect to find a job that can support their families? It's a tough question because the governments of the world have intruded into so many aspects of the global economy that it's essentially impossible to tell what the "true" price is (as expressed, for example, in loaves of bread earned per hour or some other measure that has true intrinsic value).

Friedrich Hayek pointed out (in "The Road to Serfdom") that you can't control part of an economy. It may be impossible to return to a true value-based wage system. In the meantime, we have minimum wage laws and their children (like the Jones act).

[chopperk]

Buttboy is the wrong man like Scott for the cleaning of the bridge wreckage. This clown is more interested in racism and being woke, both of which will have no benefit for the city of Baltimore nor its people.

[Salman]

If not this in particular, something like this.

Because America has lost the knack for getting things done.

[ZOOKER]

It's an indictment of US productivity and inventiveness that we can no longer build a competitive dredging vessel.

We put a man on the moon in 1969. Apparently that was our apex.

[eyeamok]

Sounds like a good law and the Republican Party should be filing Lawsuits as we speak to STOP the Rebuilding of this Bridge until and unless all Environmental Regulations are followed to the T, including a NEW Environmental Impact Report.

WHY?? Because that is what the Demonrats would do if the shoe was on the other foot.

[x]

Trump was working to onshore government purchases and doing a good job. Biden said that Trump was issuing too many waivers or excluding too many items, and that he could do it better. Biden only messed things up.