This past week was another one for which the weekend news shows are well worth watching.
Both Meet The Press and This Week dealt with the economy and what's going on with it. Part of what's going on is inflation, which, in spite of earlier Administration projections, is becoming a problem.
Part of that problem has been caused by "supply chain disruptions". Both shows, both of which featured Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, agreed on this point. The problem seems to have been caused by people basically foregoing purchases of many things "during" the still ongoing pandemic, and then seeking to buy them all at once. The Port of Los Angeles can't get all the stuff unloaded. It's now gone to twenty-four hours per day operations, which surprises me actually as I would have thought it already had that.
So, while nobody is putting it this way, this is in part what happens when your own country no longer makes anything itself and instead relies upon China to produce everything.
There's discussion of calling out the California National Guard to act as dockworkers, which would suck if you were in the Californian National Guard.
That's not all of it, however. Added to this is the post Covid change in how American's view work.
There are presently 11,000,000 unfilled jobs in the United States. These are jobs that were filled before the COVID Recession. People aren't going back to work.
And laborers are also demanding better wages and benefits in order to do the work they're doing.
This represents a dual fundamental shift in the thinking of the American work force. Part of it is old-fashioned, and part not so much.
As for better wages and benefits, following the Reagan Administration and the economic woes of the 1970s, American labor really faded from the scene as an organized entity. Of course, we lost a lot of labor to overseas as well. Now the remaining labor is fed up and taking advantage of the situation, for which it cannot be blamed.
The second part of this situation, however, is remarkable. Forced out of work during the pandemic, stay homes, lots of people discovered that modern American work sucks. They don't want to go back, as their lives were better without the work.
Some of those who don't want to go back are truck drivers. The country is short 20,000 truck drivers right now.
In recent years the country has actually imported a lot of truck drivers, something the general public seems largely unaware of. Anymore, when I read the names of people involved in truck driving accidents, I expect the drivers to be Russian, and I'm actually surprised when they are not. What happened here overall isn't clear to me, but over the last fifteen years technology has developed to where it's much easier for trucking companies to keep tabs on their truckers while on the road and things have gotten safer. At the same time, this means, as it always has, but perhaps more so, that these guys live on the road. According to Buttigieg the industry has an 80% annual turnover rate.
An 80% annual turnover rate doesn't sound even remotely possible to me, but that there's a high one wouldn't surprise me. It's a dangerous job and contrary to what people like to imagine, it doesn't really pay the drivers that well as a rule, or at least fairly often. Often the drivers are "owner operators" who own their own super expensive semi tractor and who are leasing it to the company they are driving for. That in turn means that they're often making hefty payments on the truck. I don't blame anyone for not wanting to do it.
I can blame the nation for putting itself in this situation, however.
Trucking is a subsidized industry, but people don't think of it that way. Its primary competitor is rail. Railroads put in their own tracks and maintain their own railroad infrastructure. When you see a train, everything you were looking at, from the rails to the cars, were purchased by private enterprise. When you seem a semi tractor, however, it's always traveling on a public conveyance.
It's doing that fairly inefficiently compared to rail. Rail is incredibly cheap on a cost per mile basis, and it's actually incredibly "green" as well. It's efficient. Trucks are nowhere near as efficient in any fashion. Not even in employment of human resources. Trains have, anymore, one or two men crews, the same as semi trucks, but they're hauling a lot more per mile than trucks are with just two men.
Well, sooner or later people are going to have to return to work. When the money runs out, that's the choice you have.
But this isn't going to return to normal. Whether we'll stabilize soon in a new economy, and we better hope that we do, or keep on enduring this, which will be wiping out savings and destroying earning capacity, remains to be seen. The current Administration will be a key to that.
Biden can't be blamed for the current economic situation. And people who seem to think that Trump did all things well should be aware that we'd be looking at this if Trump had won the election. But what the government can do now is really screw things up for a long time.
Part of screwing things up would be to invest heavily in nonsensical "infrastructure" spending. Right now in Congress there remains a massive infrastructure bill that would fund lots of construction in an economy in which there's a shortage of laborers, not a surplus. Where are those workers going to come from?
Well, they'll only come with much higher wages, which is inflationary.
And frankly a lot of this spending is misplaced. Spending on "roads and bridges" particularly is. That's part of the problem, not part of the solution to anything. A "supply chain" based on highways was never a good idea, and its weakness is now demonstrated. And frankly, roads and bridges are mostly a local problem.
Of course, it might be pointed out, the Federal government had a big role in causing those roads and bridges to come in. That's both true and untrue. When you look at big urban bridges, those mostly were local money. States and cities that funded those bridges don't, apparently, have the money to maintain them, which is a local problem.
But Federal highway funding does certainly exist, having really started in small but significant ways as far back as the 19th Century. The Cumberland Road was authorized by Congress in the pre railroad days of 1806. Others followed, and then rail received a lot of support when it was first going transcontinental. So it can be justly maintained that there's never really been a time when the US government didn't have a role in transportation.
It was the early 20th Century, however, when Congress started to encourage highways. It soon followed the automobile. The Lincoln Highway was the first big national effort at that, as we've discussed on this site and elsewhere.
This is a monument to one of the founders of the Lincoln Highway, located along its successor, Interstate 80. The art deco memorial was created in 1938, the "L" cement markers are markers for the Lincoln Highway that can be found here and there along its route.
While this blog started out with war memorials, it's covered quite a few trail markers over the years, and indeed I will now be adding that as a category here, meaning I have to go back and edit quite a few old posts. This marker, however, is only the second one I've posted on any of my blogs to highways, the other being the Black and Yellow Road near Gillette.
This marker is quite elaborate and very nice, being both a suitable marker for the Lincoln Highway and a nice example of an art deco piece of art.
Wyoming has also commemorated the highway, the noted individual, and the marker, with its own highway sign.
All of this is located at the same rest stop on Albany County that the Lincoln Memorial is located at. Of note, this marker was moved from its original location, which might have been one that was preferred by the individual commemorated by the marker.The Lincoln Highway ran, at least in Wyoming, right astride the Union Pacific, the original transcontinental railway. This isn't surprising either as that followed the route used by the 1919 Motor Transport Convey when it did an experimental cross-country trek showing that the nation's roads were, well, junk, at least in the west. That experiment lead in no small part to the funding of the Lincoln Highway. Be that as it may, the nation's roads were still too dicey to be used for real transcontinental transportation, as the Second World War demonstrated.
Things moved by train.
Following the war, however, President Eisenhower sought to change that with the Defense Highway system, which the nation's cynics, myself included, have always maintained was just a thin excuse to get highway funding done, as in the 1950s, with the Red Army on everyone's mind, you just didn't vote against a thing like that. So we got interstate highways and with them, you got a teamster supplied nation. You also got an annual bill as, unlike the railroads, they were public conveyances that had to keep being paid for by somebody.
So now we have them well established, but the days of Convoy are over, and the driver is as likely to be a displaced Ukrainian baker as a cowboy hat wearing part-time farmer. In 1964 the Willis Brothers sang Give Me Forty Acres To Turn This Rig Around. The drivers didn't get heir 40 acres, but a lot of them have apparently gotten sick of the job.
And it even, apparently extends down to local hauling. Massachusetts called out the National Guard to serve as school bus drivers, a call-up that would suck nearly as much as being called out to be a dockworker.
Electrifying the rail system, however, would be a really good idea. I don't see anyone purposing that, however. If you don't have drivers for trucks, well haul things by train, and start funding that as part of the infrastructure bill. That would more or less take us back to the hauling infrastructure that existed before the mid 1950s, but in a more modern, clean, and more efficient way.
Probably not going to happen.
Predictably Buttigieg, who is just back to work from being off for family leave, is pushing Biden's "paid family leave" as a partial solution. That's doubly wrong.
Paid family leave, of course, is paid for by employers. Indeed, in some unionized occupations this has been a recent point of negotiations, which is fine. That's where that belongs. Otherwise, what it amounts to is compulsory employer subsidization of forced female employment.
Nobody, of course, will say that, even though it's completely true.
The official line on this left wing concept is that. Make employers pay employees family leave when they have children, or adopt a child, or sometimes something else. Usually this has been spoken of in regard to female employees, but in the new false genderless era in which the science of baby making has been lost and babies suddenly materialize out of the ether, and human reproductive organs are simply toys, like the Atari control stick or something, its male or female. Then, having secured family leave, the parent doesn't have to make the painful decision on whether to return immediately to work after having had, or acquired, the child, or staying home with the infant.
All that of course is a completely erroneous way of looking at this topic.
To start with, people want to stay home with their infant as they love their infant. Prior to the second half of the 20th Century the forced industrial bargain was that men didn't get to stay home, but women could. Prior to industrialization people simply lived with their families, as nature would have it. The industrial revolution couldn't tolerate that, so men, the stronger part of the couple, was drug out and away from home to work and "be the breadwinner" while women still largely stayed home with their families, save for poor women who worked as well. Mid 20th Century feminism, however,r bought hook line and sinker into the industrial line, probably not too surprisingly as all left wing thought in the early 20th Century was heavily industrial in its outlook, and thought that happiness meant being in the work place.
Turns out it's not, and COVID laid the lie bare.
Anyhow, that old fable keeps on keeping on in liberal circles, so they keep pushing this industrial idea. The basic gist of it is "get to work, female wage slave, and leave that waling infant at home or in the collective child warehousing center. . . "
Now, nobody wants to say that, and most don't even think it, but that's the reality of it. So is this:
I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.
Now, thanks to COVID 19, a lot of women have effectively voted with Kay (momma of two) with their feet. They aren't coming back. And forced infant warehousing funding isn't going to change that.
But to the extent it did, and for various reasons it would somewhat, it'd be inflationary. People would take the leave, employers would pay for, and pass the cost of a non-working employee on to the consumer. The Transportation Secretary probably didn't realize that, although he should have as he received a taxpayer subsidized period of time off from working. Somebody paid for that.
Well former Mayor Pete wants to "build back better".
Or maybe President Biden does. That's part of the sale pitch for the infrastructure bill, the future of which is now in doubt.
Okay, so be smart about that. And so far, we've indicated what one of those smart things is. Rail transportation, and electric rail transportation at that.
Another smart thing, or in the vernacular "better" thing, would be not relying on a 19,270 nautical mile transportation run to a Communist country with a government that's destined to collapse sometime in the next tent to twenty years.
We only buy from China, we'd note, as the country's leaders from both parties, from the most part, have engaged in a quiet policy of exporting jobs to wherever basic production is cheapest, and its cheapest, right now, in China.
It's not cheapest in China as China has any sort of free market economy. It has a command economy that is at least somewhat analogous to Lenin's NEP. Given as it and depress wages to achieve its goals, it's cheap.
The US population has no vested interest in propping up the Chinese command economy at all. There's a basic human interest in seeing that everyone, everywhere, receives a fair wage. That can only come from one of the various free market systems. Therefore, if we're not going to make it here, we ought to buy it from folks who adhere to that basic system. Preferably, we ought to buy stuff from people working in that basic environment who also have the same basic set of economic, labor and environmental rules we do. That would be fair trade.
That's not what we're doing.
I'll skip how we could assure that, but we could assure that. Various administrations just rather didn't, as they were okay with cheap costs, not matter what that meant.
If we had done that, a lot of our manufacturing base would never have left. And the part that did would probably have gone south, to Mexico, and probably further south than that as well.
Mexico's achieved a modern middle-class economy, but you have to wonder if it would have achieved it earlier if a true fair trade policy had been the policy of the US. Mexico's economy may have now been much like ours, and for that matter, the rest of Central America's might be better.
And we wouldn't have a giant bottleneck at the Port of Los Angeles now. For that matter, we might not have a giant immigration crisis going on either.
Which I suppose bring us to our having depressed wages through a policy of ignoring illegal immigration now kicking us in the teeth.
This has been going on for quite some time with the net result that we now have 12,000,000 illegal aliens in the country. This is a separate topic, but it's bound to be the case that somebody will say that if we have 11,000,000 unfilled jobs and 12,000,000 illegal aliens, what that shows is that we need an even more unsustainable immigration rate. Quite the opposite is true.
The giant immigration rate, legal and illegal, has had the impact of unnaturally depressing wages in the construction industry, farm economy and service industries. All of these industries would have had higher pay rates for decades but for the high immigration rate, with the wage depression being particularly true in the case of those working illegally. It's not that Americans wouldn't have taken these jobs. .. we know for certain that Americans have been taking a lot of jobs they really didn't like, its that they wouldn't take them at the low pay scale that was being offered.
If those jobs had paid a basic American pay rate, Americans would have taken them. That would have meant that the economic impact would have been adjusted decades ago, with a probable result that average wages were higher and very high pay rates were lower, both of which would have been a net benefit, at least from distributist terms for the economy. So here too we're dealing with decades of neglect, but not of road sand bridges that local governments could have addressed, if they needed to, but with a complete lack of an honest approach to the immigration system, one that would have brought many fewer people in, and have actually enforced the laws that were there. This of course has also given us a massive humanitarian crisis, inflicted problems on our neighbors, and presented a massive moral dilemma for those now in power. Building back better would probably mean looking honestly to the south towards our neighbors, rather than simply hoping to "out compete" a nation on another continent whose government will ultimately collapse but which right now has a command economy, but that doesn't even seem to have entered anyone's thoughts.
What also doesn't seem to be entering people's thoughts, at least around here, is that some things can be addressed locally.
We read an article elsewhere that beef producers in Nebraska are organizing to build a packing plant. Food prices, including meat prices, are up, but as usual, stockmen aren't seeing the benefit of it.
So why not cut out the middle man, the packing industry? This can obviously be done, and elsewhere they are doing it.
And the state could help.
Rather than violently hurl money at fruitless lawsuits, which the state has been good at doing recently, why not instead have the state build a packing plant and organize it like South Dakota Cement or Dakota Mills?
Gasp, the reaction may be, that would be socialism!
Well, it need not be. It could simply be an investment by the state in a cooperative effort with the ownership to be transferred to participating stockmen. It'd be fairly easy to do. We've addressed it elsewhere and this would be the time to do it. Retail prices are high, ranchers don't see the benefit of that, cutting out the middleman would help.
But I'm sure we won't be doing that.
The legislature, of course, is going into a special session. There it's going to look at illegal bills to address OSHA mandates on vaccination that haven't even come into effect yet. A rational look at that would reveal that this will accomplish nothing, other than adding the expense of legal defenses of all sorts to the state's bills for taking an act calculated not to work. Instead of doing what it's going to do, the legislature could look around and do something about the times we do live in, and try to take advantage of them. But it won't, as those who want to protest the upcoming mandates will be fired up about that instead.
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