🇷🇺🇺🇦 Russian tankers destroy another Ukrainian stronghold

🇺🇲🇺🇦❗️The United States will welcome the transfer of fighter jets to Ukraine by other countries, Washington itself did not make promises about such assistance - White House

🚂 ☣️ Solution to E. Palestine OH Chemical Spill: Repeal the Jones Act

🇺🇸 The Jones Act: A Burden America Can No Longer Bear | Cato Institute

📃 How an archaic, burdensome law has been able to withstand scrutiny and persist for almost a century

🛤 U.S. railways and roadways are being pushed to their limit. The Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that fixing the country’s surface transportation infrastructure would require an investment of at least $155 billion per year, which amounts to roughly 23 percent of the government’s $666 billion budget deficit in 2017.

🛤 Meanwhile, heightened reliance on trucks and freight trains not only increases infrastructure and maintenance costs from wear and tear on roads, bridges, and rail but also generates greater environmental costs. Surface transportation produces more carbon emissions than ships do, and its more intensive use increases the likelihood of highway accidents and train derailments involving hazardous materials. Relatedly, time wasted in growing traffic congestion — especially on highways running parallel to U.S. sea lanes — generates enormous opportunity costs from lost wages and lost output.

⛴️ Artificially inflated waterborne shipping rates increase demand for alternative forms of transportation, including trucking, rail, and pipeline services, raising those modes’ rates and inflating business costs throughout the supply chain. Transportation expenses — incurred to move raw materials and intermediate goods to the next stage in the production process and final product to retailers and end users — comprise a significant portion of the cost of goods sold. Elevated transportation costs affect nearly every business in nearly every industry, rippling through supply chains, squeezing profits, curtailing business investment, and disadvantaging U.S. companies relative to their foreign competitors, and depriving U.S. households of savings to spend elsewhere in the economy or to invest.

⛴️ While the law’s most direct consequence is to raise transportation costs, which are passed down through supply chains and ultimately reflected in higher retail prices, it generates enormous collateral damage through excessive wear and tear on the country’s infrastructure, time wasted in traffic congestion, and the accumulated health and environmental toll caused by unnecessary carbon emissions and hazardous material spills from trucks and trains.

⛴️ Maritime Administrator and retired rear admiral Mark H. Buzby testified that “over the last few decades, the U.S. maritime industry has suffered losses as companies, ships, and jobs moved overseas.” The Jones Act fleet is not only shrinking, but rapidly aging. The typical economically useful life of a ship is 20 years.24 Yet three of every four U.S. container ships are more than 20 years old, and 65 percent are more than 30 years old. Excluding tankers, the ships in the Jones Act fleet currently average 30 years old, fully 11 years older than the average age of a ship in the world merchant fleet of other developed countries.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bear

🌐💵 Investor purchases of U.S. homes fell a record 45.8% year over year in the fourth quarter as the high cost of borrowing money and the prospect of substantial home-price declines made real estate investing less attractive.

- Charlie Bilello

⚡️🇺🇸 Norfolk Southern Railway, along with State and Federal officials, continue to evade their responsibility to the people of East Palestine, Ohio.

Americans, contact your Congressmen and demand answers as to why they can send over $100 Billion to Ukraine but can’t even show up to meetings with residents.

Railway in Siberia?
India?
Africa perhaps?

No folks, this is Ohio, America

🇺🇸💵 US Federal deficit as a % of GDP v. inverted US unemployment rate (blue dotted line = latest Treasury borrowing projection).

Only 3 ways to close this gap:

1. Face-peeling inflation.

2. Depression (as US govt slashes its ~25% of GDP spending.)

3. Productivity miracle.

- Luke Gromen

🇺🇦🇺🇸 FT: Ukraine war pushes US to review arms stockpiles

The Pentagon has launched a review of its weapons stockpiles, the US’s most senior military official said, indicating that Washington is preparing to increase arms spending because of worries about the Ukraine war’s impact on ammunition supplies.

The quantity of munitions required by the conflict has exposed vulnerabilities in the US defence industry, which is trying to pivot from peacetime production levels, while also being beset by pandemic-related shortages in parts and labour.

A recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank, found that the US defence industrial base was “not adequately prepared” for the security environment. It also said the munitions requirements of another conflict, such as a war with China in the Taiwan Strait, was likely to exceed Pentagon stockpiles.

🇺🇸🇨🇳🌐 The US ‘Domain Awareness Gap’ Goes Way Beyond Balloons, by Niall Ferguson

If a major conflict breaks out with China, America’s once-vaunted defense industrial base will be exposed as a comatose geriatric, not a sleeping giant.

▪️In an essay in Foreign Affairs last year, Michael J. Mazarr summarized a recent RAND Corporation study commissioned by the US Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment on the age-old question, “What Makes a Power Great?”

▪️“The United States ultimately prevailed over the Soviet Union in the Cold War,” Mazarr argued, “because it was more energetic, innovative, productive, and legitimate.” But can the same be said of the United States by comparison with China today?

▪️ Here’s the RAND answer: The United States displays some of the characteristics of a once dominant power that has passed its competitive prime: by some important measures, it is complacent, highly bureaucratized, and seeking short-term gains and rents rather than long-term productive breakthroughs. It is socially and politically divided, cognizant of the need for reforms yet unwilling or unable to make them, and suffering a loss of faith in the shared national project that once animated it.

But, what of China?

▪️China clearly benefits from a potent national will and ambition, both domestically and internationally, and a unified national identity among much of the population. It has an active state that is pouring resources into human capital, research and development, high technology, and infrastructure.

So, what does this mean?

In his classic book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy laid special emphasis on manufacturing as a source of power, for the simple reason that in time of war there is no substitute for having an economy that can mass-produce weapons. In the 20th century the United States was unrivaled in its industrial capacity. That has ceased to be true in the past 20 years.

As recently as 2004, US manufacturing value-added was two-and-a-half times larger than China’s. But China overtook the US by this measure in 2010. In 2021 Chinese manufacturing value-added was nearly double that of the US.

This is not 1941. The idea that the United States was a “sleeping giant” on the eve of Pearl Harbor is a myth that understates America’s preparedness for war. The program of construction that gave the US mastery of the sea in World War II began with the Naval Expansion Act of 1938. In our time, by contrast, we have been shrinking our military-industrial base.

In 2013 the Environmental Protection Agency shut down the 121-year-old Doe Run lead smelting plant in Herculaneum, MO — the last primary lead smelting plant in the country. And that’s just lead. According to a 2021 report from the Department of Energy, “of the 35 mineral commodities identified as critical … the United States lacks domestic production of 14 and is more than 50% import-reliant for 31.” No doubt great from an ESG perspective. But what about the WWIII perspective?

⚡️🇺🇸🌐 Renegade nations do not simply bend or collapse in response to U.S. air superiority as they once did.

The era “Top Gun: Maverick” celebrates no longer exists, & we need to understand why

My overview of the emergent multipolar world.

- Gladden Pappin

🇪🇺💵 Euro has resumed its fall to parity. This fixes one of the bigger mispricings in global markets. Euro should never have risen the way it did. Markets wrongly priced a mild winter and absence of energy shortages as a sign that Europe's energy shock is over. The shock is ongoing...

- Robin Brooks

🇬🇧💵 Imminent UK housing crash fast becoming the consensus position, yet none of the 2023-24 forecasts factor it in.

- Philip Pilkington