Supply Chain Update, #BareShelvesBiden and Regional Differences

Here’s a supply chain post that covers a few related topics and a little local reportage.

First, those long waits for port berths at LA/Long Beach are at an all-time high:

As of Friday, there were 105 ships waiting for berths at Los Angeles and Long Beach. That’s the highest number ever, according to FreightWaves.

Back in November, the port authorities in southern California adopted a new queuing system for ships that allows them to wait anywhere in the world without losing their spots in line. They did this because the exhaust from all the ships idling near the ports was harming the air quality. For a few weeks, this change made it appear as though the number of ships waiting had declined because they were no longer clogging up the harbor. But the Marine Exchange of Southern California adjusted its counting method soon after.

Only 16 of the 105 ships waiting are within 40 miles of the ports, FreightWaves says. The other 89 are scattered all over the world, with many congregating off the Baja peninsula.

Here’s some perspective from the story on what this congestion means relative to other times:

There are now more than three times as many container ships waiting for LA/LB berths as there were at this time last year, 11.6 times more than on June 24 (the low point for last year), and 31% more than on Oct. 24, when online searches for the term “supply chain” peaked and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach announced a new Biden administration-backed congestion fee plan.

FreightWaves also notes that the total amount of cargo waiting offshore is 815,958 TEU (20-foot equivalent units). That’s more than the combined amount of imports for Los Angeles and Long Beach for the entire month of November, the story says.

Second, #BareShelvesBiden has been trending on Twitter as people report largely bare shelves at their local supermarkets.

Indeed, it seems to be happening across the country:

When you add up all of these reports, it seems like a lot of genuine and glaring problems for the White House chief of staff to dismiss as just “an overhyped narrative”!

It’s not hard to find Biden defenders who insist that the Twitter hashtag “#BareShelvesBiden” is “artificially amplified by far-right users to manipulate the trending section.” Fine, maybe they are, but consumers and local news affiliates aren’t hallucinating these empty shelves, and businesses aren’t imagining this inability to get the supplies and parts they need.

I guarantee you that when this newsletter is shared on Twitter, some ninny will respond that he just went to Safeway or Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and didn’t see any shortages — as if the complaint about the supply chain was a contention that every shelf on every store in every community was bare. No, the problem is that an unpredictable mix of goods are suddenly unavailable, with little sense of when new shipments will arrive. Sometimes this problem has minor consequences — getting straight fries instead of curly fries — and sometimes there are huge consequences, such as oncologists who are struggling to get more medications and other medical supplies.

As with the border, inflation, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Covid-19, and the shortage of tests, we have to waste time convincing the administration that the country’s problems are actually real problems; the Biden team’s reflexive instinct is that any reports of problems are just right-wing propaganda. (Or perhaps someone like Klain will tell us to be appreciative because we have “high class problems.”)

I’m fortunate that here in Central Texas, we seem mostly unaffected. There are spot shortages of a few things at HEB (the only places I see really big holes are in luncheon meat; cuts of beef, chicken and pork in unprocessed form seem reasonably plentiful), and they’ve been out of V05 Extra Body conditioner for weeks. Sam’s also seems to be getting plentiful supplies of things, and last week they had Dog Pill Pockets (which they had been out of for several weeks before).

The nation’s supply chains may be poised to take another hit soon as Canadian vaccine mandates for truckers going into effect January 15.

Art Laffer has a recipe for fixing the problem: Get Biden Administration policies out of the way.

In an interview with “Varney & Co.” Tuesday, former Reagan economist Art Laffer called on the Biden administration to get out of the way of the supply chain crisis, arguing the administration’s economic policies are causing the problem instead of solving it.

ART LAFFER: I’d follow Reagan’s advice: Don’t just stand there, undo something. Get them out. Stop paying people not to work. Get the government out of the process and that thing will clear up very quickly. That’s exactly what needs to be done. It’s the government that is causing the supply chain problem. It’s not the solution, it’s the cause. And the same thing with rapid testing and all the other things. The one thing that Trump knew how to do was get production to work correctly. And when he put through that operation to get it – Warp Speed, to get it, it worked because he worked with the markets — not against them.

Will Biden take Laffer’s advice?

Will Jackass Forever take home the 2023 Oscar for Best Picture?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2022 at 11:26 AM and is filed under Democrats, Economics, Regulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Supply Chain Update, #BareShelvesBiden and Regional Differences”

  1. Seawriter says:
    January 12, 2022 at 8:16 AM

    Is it my imagination or are shortages more severe in Blue States?

    I can see that in Crazyforniia, where they have banned about half the long-haul trucks for environmental reasons. (Since this is to satisfy the Church of Gaia, I don’t see how laws like this fail to violate the Establishment clause, but I digress.) Reduce the available transport and you get supply chain issues. But why am I seeing more bare shelves in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than, say, Florida? Regulatory issues in Blue states?

  2. Lawrence Person says:
    January 12, 2022 at 9:05 AM

    My guess is a combination of weather, lingering lockdown affects and vaccine mandates either driving truckers to red states or encouraging them to retire.

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