With an impending supply chain crisis on the horizon, high inflation, and a shrinking labor force, the US economy is going to experience a recession. Relying on an International supply chain is a public health and national security threat. Here in America we have the supply chain situation slowing down the recovery. Many businesses have strong demand, but they can't get their goods or keep steady employees.The pandemic left the US and Europe in a wounded state, so much of the economic infrastructure is crippled, not being able to fully recover. This imbalance could tip us into another recession, one more catastrophic event, and things could fall apart very quickly The current problem is the increase in fuel and energy costs and also the crisis of containers from China that is affecting the global supply chain. In the case of vehicle manufacturing, Spain and Europe are having problems due to the lack of imported electronic chips from China and some steel industry has temporarily paralyzed its production due to high energy costs. Perhaps the government should provide tax incentives for businesses to make everything here in America. This was not really just caused by the Pandemic but the response to it. It mimicked the Chinese social control model and led to unprecedented disruptions. We should start considering doing a true Post Mortem review of what went wrong in the policy decision process. One issue is the trucking companies don't want to fork up some fair pay for the needed drivers. Also the Suez Canal obstruction, some 370 container ships were delayed. Certainly, that had a global impact. Global supply chains are simply unsustainable in the long run due to the ecological, consumptive overshoot of developed countries, the reliance on non-renewable fuels, and the search for the cheapest labor. If an economic model is a three-legged stool: capital, resources, and labor, why is it that labor is the only sector which is told to "stay put" (i.e., stay home and don't emigrate), while capital, resources, products, and "information" can move freely about the globe? Indeed the titanic ship that is globalism has struck several icebergs and is now taking on water.... This shows how brittle the global supply chain is. There is almost zero resilience: Every element in the system depends on every other element to function within very narrow parameters of time and space. This fragility appears at all scales, and in all classes of infrastructure. Covid-19 is only one of several stressors already present, and guaranteed to increase. The pandemic exposed globalization as a threat to national security. If we made what we needed within our own borders, we wouldn't have to worry about the situation in other countries or shipping clogs at ports. Or, we could simply point to the theory of supply and demand. Currently there is more demand than supply so prices are rising. As supply increases to meet demand prices will stabilize and when supply exceeds demand prices will go down. I don't understand why this is a surprise to any thinking, observant person. Of course the pandemic interrupted the supply chain ---- to the people who don't understand this, what do you think caused all the snafus in the supply chain? Americans show a gross ignorance of so many things. So discouraging that so many people living in the richest nation in the history of planet Earth are so incredibly ignorant. It is the "free market" that is responsible for matching supply with demand. Whenever the "free market" fails, the first thing they do is look to the government (the taxpayers) to bail them out. We will see how this evolves in the future, because it is clear that if this problem continues we will have a rise in prices and an increase in inflation that can be very detrimental to the global economy. The trucking industry bled its workers dry treating them as if they were a disposable commodity. I have no tears for those large trucking firms. And I have no tears for every manufacturer and retailer that depends upon goods from overseas sources. They wanted dirt cheap products because millions of unemployed Americans or workers laboring for meager wages can't make it in the real world wages, could not afford American made goods and services. There's no shortage of truck drivers. There is a plethora of drivers who are tired of working for peanuts. As for retailers of overseas products they dropped their American, domestic suppliers to save a few bucks and put millions of Americans out of work. Now those retailers are crying crocodile tears. Isn't that too bad! During World War II the United States provided millions of tons of war material to Great Britain, French Free Forces, Russia, and Australia and China too. We built thousands of ships, planes, tanks, trucks, locomotives, rail cars, rail and machine tools and electronics, articles of clothing and footwear as well as food too. If we were to become involved in a world wide conflict again we'd suffer heavy losses because of our dependence upon other nations for critical parts, raw materials and even medicines and medical supplies. We've forgotten the importance of domestic supply and domestic, skilled workers. So the short version is, people started demanding equitable pay and working conditions, and so much of our economy relied on underpaid, undervalued, and overworked human labor that it has come to a halt. Maybe universal health care, de-stigmatization of and access to mental health care, paid family leave, modest working hours, and safe and supportive work environments that promote self-care, family life, and meaningful social relationships would go a long way in restoring the American laborer and therefore the economy. Folks talk about the Supply Chain as if it's a separate entity. It's not, it's a creation of corporate America. In it's collective drive to get the lowest cost, maximize margins and drive incentive competition, they pushed product manufacturing to china. As part of their cost benefit analysis, they should've included the increased risk . They didn't. Nothing in their business continuity plans, no money set aside in case of a disruption, just people that now throw their hands up, pass on the increased costs immediately to the consumer and they blame the "Supply Chain ''. I hold corporate America and the vaunted, way overpaid CEOs responsible. They pocketed the money in the good times, they need to eat lower margins and NOT raise costs during the bad. And don't forget way too many people think they are now too good to work. Near me there are dozens of huge logistic warehouses for Lowes, Dollar Store, Home Depot, Costco etc and the roads are littered with desperate employment signs for all types of positions promising signing bonuses. Where has everybody gone? Fixing this is not as easy as many think. It requires radical restructuring of the economy, which means a radical restructuring of our assumptions and beliefs about how the economy works. And that requires radical rethinking of what we, each of us, expects to get from and contribute to the economy. Where to begin? Perhaps by asking what is the purpose of the economy. The language most commonly used about it implies that the economy is about making money. But the breakdown of the supply chains shows that's a futile idea. If the trucks stop running, my town will starve, no matter how much money we have in our bank accounts. Trucking. An industry that was pushed upon us by Big Oil. Previously, we shipped goods via private railway, but that wasn't using fuel inefficiently enough. Bright idea: let's attach a big engine to each separate boxcar. That's the ticket! Rail workers were well paid and well treated and most didn't have to leave home for days at a time. Now we ship goods across the taxpayer-funded highways, causing deadly accidents , destroying our roadways years sooner, and making passenger driving a scary nightmare. And now, supply chain issues. Too bad we've turned most of our railway infrastructure into greenways. It's the globalist/corporate model of supply and demand. We need more local production, more true competition, fewer monopolized industries. Think of supply chains instead of "the supply chain." The quest for maximum profits created supply chain problems. A supply chain was created with no redundancy or back-up so that it didn't take very much perturbation to cause it to collapse. It was deprived of regulation, redundancy and back-up because those structures cost money and reduce profits. One silver lining of the pandemic is to show the world that profit maximization at the expense of having safety nets of every kind is bad for some businesses and bad for most people. The ultra-wealthy are the only ones who benefit from profit maximization at the cost of everything else. They benefit whether or not the rest of the world is winning or losing. Note how much the billionaires have raked in since the pandemic began; why it almost equals how much was spent by the taxpayers on shoring up the economy. The ultra-wealthy bought the politicians to set up the system so it works for them all of the time. Meanwhile the rest of us are buffeted about during economic cycles and kept stagnant over the long run. Time to bring back the 90% tax bracket and fix a lot of other problems the plutocracy has created for civilization.
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