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Page added on February 13, 2022
America Is Running Out of Everything
The global supply chain is slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that it go into overdrive.
Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything?
I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. “We’re out of those too,” he said. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. “Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall.
This is the economy now. One-hour errands are now multi-hour odysseys. Next-day deliveries are becoming day-after-next deliveries. That car part you need? It’ll take an extra week, sorry. The book you were looking for? Come back in November. The baby crib you bought? Make it December. Eyeing a new home-improvement job that requires several construction workers? Haha, pray for 2022.
The U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage.
The Everything Shortage is not the result of one big bottleneck in, say, Vietnamese factories or the American trucking industry. We are running low on supplies of all kinds due to a veritable hydra of bottlenecks.
The coronavirus pandemic has snarled global supply chains in several ways. Pandemic checks sent hundreds of billions of dollars to cabin-fevered Americans during a fallow period in the service sector. A lot of that cash has flowed to hard goods, especially home goods such as furniture and home-improvement materials. Many of these materials have to be imported from or travel through East Asia. But that region is dealing with the Delta variant, which has been considerably more deadly than previous iterations of the virus. Delta has caused several shutdowns at semiconductor factories across Asia just as demand for cars and electronics has started to pick up. As a result, these stops along the supply chain are slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that they work in overdrive.
The most dramatic expression of this snarl is the purgatory of loaded cargo containers stacked on ships bobbing off the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Just as a normal traffic jam consists of too many drivers trying to use too few lanes, the traffic jam at California ports has been exacerbated by extravagant consumer demand slamming into a shortage of trucks, truckers, and port workers. Because ships can’t be unloaded, not enough empty containers are in transit to carry all of the stuff that consumers are trying to buy. So the world is getting a lesson in Econ 101: High demand plus limited supply equals prices spiraling to the moon. Before the pandemic, reserving a container that holds roughly 35,000 books cost $2,500. Now it costs $25,000.
The container situation is even weirder than it looks. With demand surging in the United States, shipping a parcel from Shanghai to Los Angeles is currently six times more expensive than shipping one from L.A. to Shanghai. J.P. Morgan’s Michael Cembalest wrote that this has created strong incentives for container owners to ship containers to China—even if they are mostly empty—to expedite the packing and shipping of freights in Shanghai to travel east. But when containers leave Los Angeles and Long Beach empty, American-made goods that were supposed to be sent across the Pacific Ocean end up sitting around in railcars parked at West Coast ports. Since the packed railcars can’t unload their goods, they can’t go back and collect more stuff from filled warehouses in the American interior.
And what about the truckers who are needed to drive materials between warehouses, ports, stores, and houses? They’re dealing with a multidimensional shortage too. Supply-chain woes have backed up orders for parts, such as resin for roof caps and vinyl for seats. But there’s also a crucial lack of people to actually drive the rigs. The Minnesota Trucking Association estimates that the country has a shortage of about 60,000 drivers, due to longtime recruitment issues, early retirements, and COVID-canceled driving-school classes.
In short, supply chains depend on containers, ports, railroads, warehouses, and trucks. Every stage of this international assembly line is breaking down in its own unique way. When the global supply chain works, it’s like a beautifully invisible system of dominoes clicking forward. Today’s omnishambles is a reminder that dominoes can fall backwards too.
And then there’s the labor market. In the U.S., job openings have hit record highs in restaurants, hotels, and other leisure and hospitality sectors. But companies are struggling to fill these roles—and to keep factories and some other businesses operating at full capacity when Delta infections roll through.
You can see these problems from a variety of angles. From workers’ perspective, unemployment insurance and several rounds of stimulus have allowed laid-off workers to be picky about jobs, instead of desperately lunging for the first paycheck available. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. But from many employers’ perspective, government programs have exacerbated a terrible labor shortage. Staffing up a business has become difficult. The result, from consumers’ perspective, is more of the same Everything Shortage. Since finding, hiring, and training hundreds of thousands of people in new roles at the same time is hard during a pandemic, we should all expect a bit of slowness across the service sector for a while—a bit more time for that cappuccino, a bit longer of a wait for that appetizer, a bit of confusion at the convenience store when you ask where the nail-polish remover is and the new employee who had to Zoom in for her training program needs a moment to remember the aisle numbers.
Finally, as if those slowdowns weren’t enough, there’s the mail. As of this month, the U.S. Postal Service is reducing its use of air transportation to save money. The USPS estimates that deliveries outside your local area will likely be delayed by one or two days. But as we’ve seen, relying on rail and truck means leaning on systems that are dealing with their own mess.
This has not yet added up to a recession. But it portends a massively frustrating holiday-shopping period, especially for households with a habit of buying presents at the last minute. “I’ve been doing this for 43 years and never seen it this bad,” Isaac Larian, the founder and CEO of the toy maker MGA Entertainment, told Bloomberg. “Everything that can go wrong is going wrong at the same time.” USPS has already announced price hikes for the winter holidays. To avoid paying those surcharges and suffering the yuletide wrath of disappointed children, the recommended course of action is clear: If you want it by December 25, start placing those orders soon. Everyone complains when stores start playing carols and advertising holiday sales in October. This year, “Christmas creep” is your best shopping strategy. Either that, or prepare the kids to celebrate Christmas morning some time in January.
How will the Everything Shortage be resolved? One possibility is that Americans adopt a sustainable, ascetic, and homespun lifestyle that reduces our dependency on goods that activate the global supply chain. If you can seriously envision such a world, I envy your gift of imagination.
The best solution to the Everything Shortage is to have a policy to make more of just about everything. Containers, which carry more than 90 percent of the world’s traded goods, are overwhelmingly manufactured in China. Why doesn’t America make more? Car parts, semiconductors, and home goods have been offshored, making the U.S. sorely reliant on overseas factories. Why can’t America make more? At-home COVID-19 tests, which could illuminate household infections and prevent community spread, were only just authorized by the FDA, almost two years into this pandemic. Why hasn’t America made more?
For decades, many U.S. companies moved manufacturing overseas, taking advantage of cheaper labor and cheaper materials across the oceans. In normal times, America benefits from global trade, and the price of offshoring is borne by the unlucky few in deindustrialized regions. But the pandemic and the supply-chain breakdowns are a reminder that the decline of manufacturing can be felt more broadly during a crisis when we run out of, well, damn near everything. That’s why Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan includes billions of dollars to reshore manufacturing, invest in basic research, and beef up domestic supply chains.
Our dearth of manufactured parts and containers is part of a broader crisis of manufactured scarcity in America. A protectionist and anti-growth instinct runs through government, yielding not only a flat-footed CDC and a tardy FDA but also sharp restrictions on housing construction, immigration, and the licensing of new professionals and tradespeople. Focusing on the redistribution of income and goods is natural for today’s progressives, who tend to emphasize the virtue of equality. One lesson of the Everything Shortage is: You cannot redistribute what isn’t created in the first place. The best equality agenda begins with an abundance agenda.
Today’s crisis is an opportunity to emphasize a new philosophy of what The New York Times’ Ezra Klein calls “supply-side progressivism,” which sees value in this across-the-board abundance. This approach might start by prioritizing policies that reduce the cost of housing and health care, and reshoring the production of materials that we deem essential to national security during a pandemic or an unrelated supply-chain calamity. Decades from now, we might look at the legacy of the pandemic, and see that it took a global crisis of choke points to teach us that real progress begins by removing the choke points at home.
65 Comments on "America Is Running Out of Everything"
Biden's hairplug on Thu, 17th Feb 2022 5:22 pm
From now on, this guy (?) is responsible for all US nuclear waste:
https://www.anti-spiegel.ru/2022/der-ganz-normale-wahnsinn-wer-ab-sofort-fuer-den-us-atommuell-verantwortlich-ist/
Biden’s hairplug on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 1:01 am
Olympics coming to an end, completely dominated by Europeans, Norway wins again (five million inhabitants, too much money from North Sea oil and gas)
Brexit dividend: ZERO medailles for the UK. Canada tumbling too:
https://nos.nl/peking2022/medailles
Ice hockey all-European event: Finland, Slovakia, Sweden, Russia.
“Old Europe” (according to 9/11 conspirator Rumsfeld, he is dead now).lol
Biden’s hairplug on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 1:20 am
America is not running out of people keen for cuvil war:
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/11/joe-walsh-on-what-the-left-doesnt-get-trumpworld-would-happily-this-country-down/
Joe Walsh on what the left doesn’t get: TrumpWorld “would happily burn this country down”
They would, they will. Very good article!
Next Olympics 2026 in Italy. Probably going to be a Europeans only event, the rest too busy killing each other.
Biden's hairplug on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 6:23 am
“Gibraltar fires furious warning shots to Spain: ‘If you hinder us, we will hinder you'”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1567613/gibraltar-news-gibraltar-brexit-latest-news-gibraltar-spain
Gibraltar is a nice opportunity to finally chase the British out of Europe completely. Don’t do this too soon though, because the US would certainly intervene on the side of the UK. Wait until the US and China clash in East Asia. That will be the moment to leave NATO, expel Anglos and their nukes from Europe and team up with Russia.
White civilization saved.
“Brexit Britain steams ahead! Huge milestone reached in £8.4TRILLION trade deal to rival EU”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1568053/brexit-news-uk-trade-deal-cptppp-latest-accession-final-stage
Gooks are friends, white people are rivals.
You can’t have the English mind better exposed than this. They will always wait on their rainy island for opportunities to get Europe destroyed, if necessary, with thugs like the ZOG-USA and ZOG-USSR to do the heavy lifting.
Regarding that trade deal: a pity that Britain hasn’t that much to trade with in the first place. Probably yet another one-sided affair, where the Asians reap all the benefits, just like the Australians did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_current_account_balance
UK 2nd largest trade deficit in the world, to be paid for by selling out the country to foreigners. British live way beyond their means. 122 billion $ year in, year out, on a GDP of 2708 billion or 5%. To top it off, they break with their most lucrative trading partner, located next door, which finishes off small businesses, that doesn’t have the means to roam the jungle of East Asia on the lookout for customers.
That’s what you get if Westminster does let it happen that a funny chap with a red bus is allowed to pee in Westminster’s soup and call for a referendum, depriving Westminster of the opportunity to stay in the EU until they have found their opportunity to destroy the EU from within, for instance by bringing Turkey in. Farage removed the UK time bomb from the EU just in time. There never was a difference in motivation between Westminster and Farage, just a difference in timing and strategy. Thanks Nigel, old fool!
Nigel Farage in his plane crash:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/media/images/52167000/jpg/_52167361_009233711-1.jpg
British televison sketch about the EU. Intended as a joke, it very much represents real English feelings towards “the continent”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYqB0uTKlE
England wants Europe divided if not destroyed and the US on top.
Sadly (for the UK), the end of that strategy is a plain sight. It cost them their empire in 1945, it is going to cost them their country after WW3.
Biden's hairplug on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 7:27 am
5 major Canadian banks went offline for hours:
https://www.geenstijl.nl/5163627/trudeau-bevriest-34-crypto-wallets-want-konvooi-vijf-grote-canadese-banken-uren-lang-offline/
Does that have something to do with the latest commie sanctions against patriots? Is this the result of a bank run?
Biden's hairplug on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 11:56 am
Trudeau in big trouble:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVUVrykY0pg
Trudeau had accused a poor jewish conservative and holocaust survivor (37) of teaming up with swastika wavers. So mean.
Australians are the most realistic and least hysterical of all Anglos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCCLj7u3eWo
“‘All signs’ are indicating that Russia is ‘not going anywhere’”
Fox News and Mike Pompeo want to “crush” Russia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpYqvVc67m8
Probably too clueless to realize that the US would be crushed too. Reps are just as clueless as Dems.
Whatever. Monday China has its hands free. These Olympics have lasted long enough. Time for some serious action.
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 4:37 pm
clog reads Wikipedia, 1 article & 2 videos & now he’s an expert on Canadian patriotism & a world renown historian of the Canadian trucker protests of 2022. New book due out next fall.
clog thinks Trucker protesters are grass roots patriots 100% home grown & funded by smashing their piggy banks.
According to clog’s Soros detection manual if it’s a libtard protest it’s 100% George Soros run & funded no matter what they are protesting for…by default.
Any right leaning protesters are always pure & entirely thought up by…’insert oppressed hard working blue collar narrative”.
This article is more than 10 years old
Astroturfing: what is it and why does it matter?
Creating the illusion of widespread support for a policy used to take place in papers – now it’s online and even more powerful
“Although usually associated with the internet, the practice has been widespread ever since newspaper editors first invented the letters page. Pick up any local paper around the time of an election and you will find multiple letters from “concerned residents of X” objecting to the disastrous policies of Y. Similarly, concerned residents often turn up on talk radio shows and even in campaign literature, although the latter can prove more dangerous, as Labour party activists posing as residents in Greenwich discovered a few years back.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-is-astroturfing
Well known tactics, but the narrative trumps reason. It’s easy to do because the chimps crave story.
The narratives are especially effective on loner rejects like clog whose only human contact is 90 seconds every other day at a grocery store cash register.
What I find interesting is how the evolutionary drive to tribe-up still dictates so much behavior on people like clog.
clog says all the right words that SIGNAL to any conservative readers out there that he is one of them. In addition, clog provides links to tribal supporting stories that act like extra loud tribal signaling.
This promotion of tribal dogma is what makes up the overwhelming majority of logs life, yet he has never met any of his fellow tribe members, nor wants to.
It’s all a big soap opera piped in to your head digitally.
A poor man’s crude early version of the Matrix
clog if the science progresses enough before you die they might come up with a way to preserve your brain indefinitely & keep your memories & conciseness intact.
They’ll sell your house & assets, remove your brain and put it in a jar on a shelf in a server farm & hook you up to a never ending narrative if your choosing.
You’re 3/4ths of the way already. Why power & heat an entire home for your body & that huge expense for consumer goodies & your share of the food system? Get rid of the body that’s
80 % of all your calories.The brain box only needs a simple glucose solution.
In the end it’s all about emotions. You can get them all with the brain box at 96% of the energy & impact you have now.
Also, you can finally have sex which will dial down your hate & holocaust urges by a min 85%.
My girlfriend ‘feels bad’ for your life of loneliness. She thinks it’s never too late for love & a bunch of that huggy-hopey BS.
I say you are broken & beyond hope.
Only evolutionary programming can explain how you can never leave the house yet hate people & places on one hand while supporting a different bunch of people you don’t know on the other hand.
Explain that. I dare you.
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 4:56 pm
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!!
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!!
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!!
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!!
This US MSM/STATE DEPT BS reminds me of Vegas show
ELVIS! in Vegas – 2 invasion-shows everynight for 90 days.
7pm & 11pm get your tickets now!
Don’t miss the best invasion in town!
Biden’s hairplug on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 6:47 pm
“Explain that. I dare you.“
That’s pretty scary, so much text devoted to a single “fellow” board member. I really must go on your nerves. Are you sure you can leave your imaginary girlfriend alone that long?
https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-news-02-18-22-intl/index.html
“Biden says US believes Russia intends to attack Ukraine “in the coming days””
Remember the feb 16 prediction? Putin is going to invade AGAIN!
https://www.rt.com/news/549921-nato-expansion-russia-document/
“Document confirms US told Russia NATO won’t expand“
“Putin was right, Stoltenberg was wrong: NATO “brazenly deceived” Russia about expansion and a British document proves it“
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 7:53 pm
brain clog. I’ve ignored the theater since day 1, but since you are so obsessed with the supposed trucker protesters I did my own search…
From Canada to Brazil, rich right-wing elites are astroturfing ‘trucker’ protests
Supported by wealthy right-wing elites, so-called “trucker” protests (led by non-truckers) have paralyzed the capitals of Brazil and Canada in less than six months.
The campaigns have many similarities – including some of the same well-funded conservative networks.
https://multipolarista.com/2022/02/14/canada-brazil-trucker-protests-right-wing/
clog uses primitive tactics he learned from a scrawny dead nazi. Gobbles loved the flip flop blame because no thinking is needed.
Just accuse the opposing tribe of perpetrating the same crimes & exhibiting the same scumbag behavior as your inbred tribe is doing…..and keep repeating it until everyone
falls asleepbelieves it.The libtards are losers big time but when it comes to lying lying lying right-wingers are #1.
right-wingers like clog always fall back on machine gun lying because he lacks the skill & sophistication to produce quality propaganda.
Even people who share your conservative politics won’t listen to your drivel – you embarrass them.
Constant crying about Grorge Soros over the last 3 decades makes you look extra stupid & weak because y’all call him stupid & evil & only EXTRA STUPID can’t beat regular stupid.
Decade after decade, Soros does whatever he whats – hey clog have you tried throwing your tear soaked Kleenex at him? If 100 of you cry babies all threw it at Soros at the same time you could knock him over so hard his assistant will need to help him up. After, you & team limp wrist will go out for victory drinks. Y’all can hi-5, giggle & feel bad ass for the night.
Rightwing billionaire cunts meddle more than Soros
The Koch bros [1 died ha ha] have built a global network of anti-freedom propagandist including an entire group that exists just to discredit your beloved ‘alt energy’.
I luv em all. Anyone or thing that helps speed the MegaCancer’s self destruction is alright by me. Cull cull cull
FamousDrScanlon on Fri, 18th Feb 2022 8:34 pm
By accident I had to watch 15 mins of MSNBC today[Boomer family friend’s living room] & 20 min of CNN last week [Boomer mom’s living room].
clog you should apply for a job since you posses
the one and only prerequisite, which is to pretend the unimportant is all important all day until orders to switch to a new all important come in. Most of the viewers are boomers with super short term memories. As long as they are kept excited they ask no questions.
They use many more women for talking heads than I remember. I assume it’s because of their inherent ability to break out in hysterics, lie & cry at the drop of a hat.
I know you don’t posses a vagina clog, but you are a huge cunt & you have the ability to break out in hysterics & lie with the best of them.
If it was up to me, I’d fire 1 or 2 of those bitches & hire you.
Biden’s hairplug on Sat, 19th Feb 2022 1:18 pm
Meanwhile in British Columbia:
https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/1495113649244950528
Kevin Cobley on Fri, 25th Feb 2022 9:03 pm
Yeah, Graphics cards have tripled in price.
ANAL CAPTURE SHOCK elite darkie supertard Sohrab Lutchmedial MUZZ-19 ATTN elite whitey supertard Kevin Cobley REPROST thecovidblog SHOCK streetshitter who wanted to punch people in the face HAS A VRY GOOD SOUL thecovidblog on Fri, 25th Feb 2022 9:11 pm
ORLY? A GOOD SOUL?
SHOCK streetshitter made fun of America’s gun culture
SHOCK streetshitter MUZZ-19 and gone BYEBYE
please feel at ease we are muzzie lovers
ANAL CAPTURE SHOCK on Fri, 25th Feb 2022 10:50 pm
SHOCK