re: Why has the United States fallen so far in shipbuilding?

South Korean shipyards do not have to build to South Korean specs. They have flags of convenience.

Also South Korean labor workers and engineers are not cheap. However they have a lot of qualified good workers and supplement with cheaper Indian engineers. Their work culture is quite a bit more impactful than the USA.

Some of the remaining US shipbuilding construction is tied to government contracts.

See Bollinger, ThomaSea, Conrad, and Ingalls, who have cornered the government market for vessels for military and research purposes.

If you thought welfare queens depended on government cheese, these companies have rebounded on open ended government contracts with a huge market up as some the military’s older vessels reach retirement age.

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See Bollinger, ThomaSea, Conrad, and Ingalls,

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Aren’t you forgetting somebody there??

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Aren’t you forgetting somebody there??

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Chouest…could be on the list but I left them off because they construct their own vessels for their own use. Now some of those vessels do involve government contracts for research purposes. Also Chouest owns Bollinger after Boysie sold the yards to Chouest, but left a member of the Bollinger family to still control it and kept the name instead of rolling it into its North American Fabrication or LAShip divisions.

We still build ships for the navy.

Less commercial.

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but left a member of the Bollinger family to still control it and kept the name

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And if I'm not mistaken they STAY busy building Coast Guard boats.

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European’s almost entire lives are subsidized by the government.

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A good portion of their lives and the lives of everyone on the planet is subsidized by the American taxpayer in the form of global security. We foot that bill more or less completely on our own. This is why we can't have the nice things that other nations have. We are the parents and the rest of the world are the teens still living at home for free and bitching about the internet speed and the ugly car they were given...

God forbid though anyone suggest we cut the military budget by more than a token amount. No one is going to stand for that shite, even when the military people who are responsible for spending the money tell us that its too much....

I don't know that there is an option by the way. If the US were to significantly cut military spending and tell the rest of the world they needed to step it up and actually meant it I am not sure that A) the rest of the world would do it and B) if they did do it they would not immediately turn on one another like they did periodically prior to the end of the second world war. It may well be that the prolonged global peace since WW2 is due to the benevolence of the US Empire where we build trading partners not nations....I am not sure China or Russia would be so benevolent. Many in the world squall like mashed kitties about US influence globally BUT they are probably not going to be happy with that influence shifting from Washington to Beijing or Moscow....

There's some commercial business out there still. We still need brown water boats, port to port blue water boats, etc. If not for the Jones act though, none of those boats would be built here. It just costs too damned much here, for the reasons previously listed (environmental, labor, land, etc).

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but left a member of the Bollinger family to still control it and kept the name

And if I'm not mistaken they STAY busy building Coast Guard boats.

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They have been busy building cutters for the Coasties since the mid 1980’s when Vice President Bush visited Lockport. I guess when you sell your soul to politicians and keep the “donations” rolling in, you get to keep the government bacon rolling in. The first contract was over 20 years, and then they retrofitted some of those vessels to make them longer and refurbish some of the electronics. The government sued over the retrofit because some the welds were bad making the vessels unseaworthy. But Bollinger still managed to get another newer larger class of cutters with new tech needed after 9/11. Just last week they had a dedication ceremony for 2 vessels being constructed in honor of 2 coasties killed in 9/11. 2 pieces of steel from the WTC will be on those vessels.

Most all ship building work is for Military and Goverment vessels. The rest is barges and smaller tractor tugs and tugboats. The days of US building Ocean Liners and Cargo Ships are almost gone.