Let’s face it.
Joe Biden is not a rocket scientist, and he has a long history of being wrong on virtually everything he touches.
But someone is going to have to help me understand his latest move that just makes absolutely no sense to me.
Biden previously said he was going to try to solve the supply chain crisis.
His first move — saying that the Port of Los Angeles was going to operate 24/7 – hasn’t been achieved yet and hasn’t seemed to do much of anything to change the situation. Indeed, after he said that, there were a record number of ships waiting to unload at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — 100 ships.
But now, he’s saying they’re going to be fining the ships who are stuck in the logjam.
The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach announced Monday that containers moved by trucks will have nine days before fines start accruing and containers scheduled to move by rail will have three days.
In accordance with these deadlines, carriers will be charged $100 for each lingering container per day starting Nov. 1.
“The terminals are running out of space, and this will make room for the containers sitting on those ships at anchor,” explained Port of Long Beach Executive Director Mario Cordero in a statement announcing the measure.
The Biden administration is hopeful new fines imposed on carriers will solve the logjam, CNBC notes.
The companies are stuck up a creek without a paddle, and Biden just wants to beat them up more.
Isn’t this just punishing the victims of this situation, in part created by mandates and other government restrictions as well as other things which they had no control over? How does fining them speed up this situation? They still have to do something with their cargo. What are they supposed to do with it? Throw it into the sea?
Then, on top of that, if you increase their costs which are already spiraling out of control, you will increase the costs for the companies, then for the products and then for the consumers. So, the immediate response from ships/companies would be stop shipping as much, increasing all the shortages and likely having new ones that we haven’t had yet. Exactly how is this hard to understand? Moreover, Biden is doing this right as we go into the holiday season. What a mess.
The Biden ‘solution’ to things always seems to be: do something to cover it up or hide it, not actually resolve it. He just wants to do away with the visual of the ships waiting, not figure out how to make it better.
Not getting enough Afghan allies who actually helped us evacuated? Grab random ‘at risk’ Afghans and throw them on the planes to pump up the numbers. Got thousands of illegal aliens stuck under a bridge in Del Rio? Focus on a fake story about the Border Patrol whipping them and then release them all over the country. Poof! No more problem. Except for the next group of thousands coming because the problems were not addressed.
Now, there is a truth that they seem to have stumbled upon there: that the problem is in part due to the lack of container space.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis offered Florida ports as an alternative. But Biden apparently doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that offer.
There’s also another idea posed by Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of logistics company Flexport. He said he took a boat around the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach last week and observed that barely anything was getting unloaded because there was such a traffic jam of containers. They can’t bring in new ones until the old ones get unloaded.
The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded.
— Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) October 22, 2021
So, what was his solution?
To help alleviate the crisis, Petersen suggested the creation of a temporary container yard at an adjacent government-owned location and the deployment of National Guard- and military-owned container chassis to the port for 180 days. He also called on President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom to issue executive orders overriding zoning rules to allow truck yards to store more empty containers.
Petersen went on to compare the current supply-chain crisis and the possibility of ports shutting down to the 2008 crash of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. that led to the Great Recession.
“With Lehman the government could just print tons of money to flood the banks with liquidity,” Petersen said. “Here we need real world solutions.”
Unfortunately, we have Joe Biden who’s not good at real world solutions. #EmptyShelvesJoe is about to make it worse.
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