However, Puerto Rico has a long and troubled history of suffering from the conditions of the Jones Act. An op-ed published in The New York Times yesterday highlighted its impact on the island, arguing that the nearly-century old law has caused inflated prices for Puerto Rican consumers for decades. Here’s an excerpt:

A 2012 report by two University of Puerto Rico economists found that the Jones Act caused a $17 billion loss to the island’s economy from 1990 through 2010. Other studies have estimated the Jones Act’s damage to Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Alaska to be $2.8 billion to $9.8 billion per year. According to all these reports, if the Jones Act did not exist, then neither would the public debt of Puerto Rico.

Three American territories are exempt from the Jones Act, including the United States Virgin Islands. Outright repeal of the law has already been backed by the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute and several major publications. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the Jones Act hurts the Puerto Rican economy, and two Republicans, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Representative Gary Palmer of Alabama, have submitted bills to repeal or suspend the law. (The shipbuilding industry supports the law.)

Quote by Scoopster:
Now they're trying to push Peyton Manning to run for Senate in TN.

Quote by BobR:

Quote by wickedpam:
ugh - right wing friend is trying to clap back with a quote from the article that its because the ports were damaged in Puerto Rico.

Shouldn't that be up to the various ships' captains to decide if they want to risk it? And if it's okay for OUR ships, why not others?

Quote by Mondobubba:

Quote by BobR:

Quote by wickedpam:
ugh - right wing friend is trying to clap back with a quote from the article that its because the ports were damaged in Puerto Rico.

Shouldn't that be up to the various ships' captains to decide if they want to risk it? And if it's okay for OUR ships, why not others?

I would think that would not fall to the captain, but rather to the owner(s) of the vessel. Also, the harbormaster for a given port.

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.