A 21st century Emergency Shipbuilding Program would look like this:

• 75 revitalized shipyards
• 38.25 million new employees (including offsite support workers)
• 2,700 ships built annually (3 per yard per month)

Sounds like an enormously expensive proposition for us taxpayers – but is it? Let’s see.

The cost of revitalizing each shipyard would be about $ 50 million – at most. That cost would be a one-time expenditure of about $ 3.75 billion.

The total amount to be paid in annual salaries to the 38.25 million newly-employed workers – allowing for annual salaries of $ 75,000 per worker – would be about $ 2,868,750,000,000.

The construction cost for each of the 2,700 patented container ships would be about $ 40 million – an annual cost of $ 108 billion.

The total cost to create 38.75 million shipbuilding jobs would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $ 2,980,500,000,000, but Title XI shifts 87.5% of that amount to lenders – like the banks that have been ripping us off! So the 12.5% cost to us comes to about $ 372.5 billion – a lot less than what the so-called “stimulus” programs are costing us taxpayers – and according to reports from the G20 meetings, Treasury Secretary Geithner wants to stick us with still another “stimulus” program.

Those “stimulus” programs – contrary to the hoop-la coming from administration spokespersons – have generated exactly no jobs and exactly no paychecks for our unemployed. Without even considering the positive effects Title XI would have on our costs, let’s compare those fiascos with what our 2,700 ships per year would generate:

• Each vessel would be purchased (by U.S. interests) for about $ 75 million.
• Each vessel would require a crew of about 30 U.S. seamen.
• Those new container ships would bring all our existing – and foundering – container terminals up to speed, and would require the construction of an additional 100 or more terminals as well – creating still more employment opportunities.
• Construction workers by the millions would be needed to build homes, schools, hospitals, shopping centers, and the roads and highways in the busy communities spouting up around the new shipyards and container ports.
• And that entire shipbuilding cost of $ 2,980,500,000,000, by the way, would be plowed right back into our economy. We’d be regaining our “buying power”, because unemployment is what took away our buying power and plunged us into this economic tailspin.

U.S. shipyards – patented “Jones Act” container ships – U.S. jobs. It’s the only way out of this mess.