Supply problems no one wants to discuss

 

Forget everything else you've heard.

1. We are preposterously dependent on China, ceased making much of anything in USA. China supplies 90% of our electronics, antibiotics, vitamins, plumbing parts, toys, tools, clothing, furniture, you name it. If it were up to me, I would order the fleet of Chinese container ships parked offshore to go home. It's a matter of national security. We need to rebuild and expand US manufacturing.

2. Stop wiring new cars with complicated accessories. Automakers canceled orders for Chinese chips because car sales plummeted a year ago and idiot managers put themselves at the back of the line for "just in time" shipments. Has nothing to do with the container bottleneck. Chips are flown in by DHL, FedEx and scheduled airlines, international flights halted by lockdowns and flight crew quarantine. US chips made in Silicon Valley are shipped to China. How smart is that? And worse, the F-35 is equipped with Chinese chips, a back door vulnerability to enemy combat radar and targeting. We need to claw back semiconductor manufacturing pronto, roughly $200 billion in capital investment, an almost trivial sum compared to Federal spending of $7 trillion this year.

3. The bottleneck at Long Beach and San Pedro is union rules and Customs inspection. Every container has to be opened to check for fentanyl hidden in the cargo. Union longshoremen have to move every container with electric dock ferries to Customs and then to a warehouse. There are lines of California approved big rigs waiting 36-72 hours, loaded with empty containers to swap for full ones that they will haul to the state line, where lines of idle long haul diesel rigs are waiting for loads because they aren't allowed to enter California. A total clusterfuck caused by delays in ordering, delays in shipping, union rules, Air Quality prohibition of diesel engines manufactured before 2011, and Biden paying workers to stay home instead of working. In August, four million people quit or retired, mostly in food service and retail, fed up with low pay, long hours, rising crime, and stifling masks. There are 350,000 commercial warehouse and driver jobs advertised with top wages and hiring bonuses offered, no applicants.

4. Christmas hysteria is stupid. You can't buy love. Make popcorn and sing carols. Hug your kids, watch It's A Wonderful Life and turn off the damn digital crap. Every Apple product was made in China. Talk to each other for a change. Be prepared to answer kid questions honestly. If you believe in Jesus, read the story of Bethlehem aloud, or let Linus recite it in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

5. The myth of "US energy independence" is one of the most pernicious lies shouted endlessly by Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, after Biden's embargo of drilling on Federal land. In 2019, America consumed 20 million barrels a day and we produced only 14 million bpd. The rest of it was imported from Canada, Mexico, Arabia, and Brazil. The current situation is worse, producing 12 million bdp — half of it from horizontal fracturing in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and North Dakota, the other half from vertical wells in deepwater Gulf of Mexico and Kern County California. Oil frackers are making money at $80 a barrel, but they have to keep drilling because horizontal wells have steep decline curves and they are running out of rich oily shales to frack on state and private leases. Biden's order to stop auctioning new Federal leases halted investment in multibillion dollar deepwater projects in the Gulf and exploration of the Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, a frozen coastal swamp hundreds of miles from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near Prudhoe Bay (which is almost kaput as a producing field, drilled in the 1970s).

6. Coal matters more than you know. If they kill coal, we're going to have blackouts and brownouts, no power to charge a huge fleet of electric vehicles that GM and Ford are tooling up to manufacture. I don't care how many solar panels and wind turbines are mandated by the Green New Deal. Storms will wreck costly offshore wind installations. Solar produces nothing at night, in the rain, or in dim winter sun.

7. At the moment, Federal Reserve bond purchases of $2 trillion a year and 0.25% interest rate policy is floating $30 trillion of Treasury debt. The Green New Deal and lavish cradle to grave free shit will double that debt over the next two decades, $60 trillion that will cut our AAA credit rating and push up interest rates. The long term historical interest rate for Treasury debt is 4%, maybe 7% for the $20 trillion owed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 9% for a future $20 trillion of state, county, and city debt. We will hit a brick wall sooner or later, paying as much interest as Medicare and Medicaid combined. No money for new warships, new aircraft, or new missiles to counter the Chinese threat. Mild 6% inflation today will become 25% hyperinflation. Gangsters and desperados will terrorize unarmed suburban whites.

Bottom line, socialism is a speeding train wreck. Big surprise, huh?

FDR famously asked John Maynard Keynes what would happen in the long run, and Keynes answered, "In the long run, Mister President, we'll all be dead."

Mike Gallagher can't understand why nobody wants to work. They were paid to stay home, scared stiff of being exposed to Covid, don't want to be assaulted or carjacked, waiting for another Federal check, fatter SNAP, free preschool and daycare, $3,000 a year for each kid, a Social Security COLA boost, free rent and utilities, free health care, free booster shots, food pantry boxes and Meals on Wheels. It doesn't matter whether a liberal or a conservative takes charge. The road to socialism is a one-way ticket. Entitlements will never be repealed. Millions of illegal immigrants will never be deported.

Remember Mrs. Thatcher, the iron lady? She doubled the NHS budget, expanded social services, gave "job seekers" weekly benefits, free college, and free housing. Donald Trump was no better, handed tens of billions to airlines and Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J, hundreds of millions to Walgreens, CVS, WalMart, Target, General Motors, and states and localities, plus 80 million Treasury checks, up to $3,600 for a family of four — a total of $1 trillion emergency "stimulus" in freshly printed Federal debt.

Postscript to Hannity and Levin. Shut the fuck up about Nord Stream II, a second natural gas pipeline from Russia to western Europe. The first Nord Stream line was completed over a decade ago, a joint venture with Germans, who have no gas of their own. The Dutch Groningen field is kaput. Siberia has fifty times the natural gas reserves that USA does, and we can't compete with gas rich Russia or Qatar. American gas reserves are shrinking, both conventional and unconventional, barely enough to keep the lights on, make steam, and cook dinner another decade or two. Subsidizing LNG exports is idiotic.

It's hilarious that you two bozos think Keystone XL had something to do with US energy independence — a 100% Canadian funded project to sell us more Canadian crude.