America is facing a trucker crisis.
As it readies for the busy holiday delivery season, the industry is expecting to be short about 73,000 long-distance drivers, more than three times the shortage of 2005, and that could lead to delivery delays and higher shipping costs.
“It’s at a point today where it is an operational hardship. It could soon be that at your store, not everything is there that you are accustomed to being there,” said Bob Costello, chief economist and senior vice president of the American Trucking Associations.
“This is an industry that has problems finding drivers,” he told the Washington Examiner.
While the country has more than enough big rigs to move America’s commerce, the driver shortage is hitting every industry, not just FedEx or UPS. The incoming president of the National Pork Producers Council, for example, said his sprawling industry is being affected, and sometimes he is finding it difficult to get pork products to market or to ports to be shipped overseas.
“We can’t get drivers,” said Ken Maschhoff, whose Illinois company, the Maschhoffs Inc., is the nation’s third-largest pork producer. “There is a severe shortage of truck transport drivers.”
Costello explained that the shortage has led to a massive turnover rate, somewhat similar to the IT world where the demands of companies outstrip worker supply.
The American Trucking Associations has raised concerns that if some changes aren’t made, the shortage could grow to 174,000 by 2024.
In a report, the group said the shortage is driven partly because of retirements, drivers trying to stay home more instead of being on the road for 10 straight days, low pay and the difficulty of trucking companies to find operators with clean driving records.
The shortage has prompted calls for driverless trucks and a lowering of the interstate driving age from 21.
“Autonomous commercial trucks could eventually have a positive impact on the driver shortage,” said a report from the group. “Eventually, one could envision an environment when the longer, line-haul portion of truck freight movements are completed by autonomous trucks and local pick-up and deliver routes are completed by drivers.”
As with drones, the federal government would have to approve robotic trucks on the roads.
Costello also said Washington could create a “pilot program” to give drivers younger than 21 a provisional license to haul big rigs across state lines. Currently, several states allow drivers 18-21 to drive tractor-trailers.
To explain the crisis, Costello pointed to truck-driving schools. Typically, students go through hours of classes before getting their commercial driver’s license before applying for a job. But now, he said, “on day one they are getting recruited.”
Home schooling ripped by Obama education chief
With nearly 2 million students and even a Virginia college dedicated to their higher education, parents and kids who home-school ought to be getting some respect in Washington.
Instead, President Obama’s education chief is expressing concerns that the growing practice is robbing children of educational and life experiences.
“I worry that in a lot of cases, students who are home-schooled are not getting the kind of the breadth of instruction experience they would get in school, they’re also not getting the opportunity to build relationships with peers unless their parents are very intentional about it,” said Education Secretary John B. King Jr.
“And they’re often not getting those relationships with teachers and mentors other than their parents. I do worry whether home-schooled students are getting the range of opportunities we hope for for all kids,” he said.
Yet, that’s not to say it’s all bad, he added. “There are examples of families that are doing it incredibly well with great intention,” said King, who noted that some of his home-schooled college classmates “experienced tremendous economic success.”
Despite his concerns, King said that there isn’t much research on home schooling to prove if it works or not. “I’ve not seen research evidence around home schooling,” he said.
Trump must match Reagan ’84 victory with white voters
The long-predicted demographic shift among U.S. voters is expected to crash into the 2016 election, forcing Republican Donald Trump to boost his percentage of white voters to historic highs, according to a GOP pollster’s analysis.
“In every single presidential election since 1996, the proportion of whites in the electorate has declined by 2, 3 or 4 percentage points,” said Whit Ayres, noting that George W. Bush won 58 percent of the white vote and 26 percent of the non-white vote in 2004.
“That is a losing hand in 2016,” he added.
Mitt Romney in 2012 beat President Obama among whites, 59-39 percent, but lost because he got just 17 percent of non-whites.
To win this year, Trump needs to get more minorities or 65 percent of the white vote. And, said Ayres, “That’s only been done once in the history of exit polling by Ronald Reagan in a 49-state landslide sweep.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
