To clean up the environment, President Biden’s fix is to buy electric vehicles. To achieve this, he paused federal oil and gas lease sales, resulting in higher gas prices.
Well, he’s doing it again. Remember when he said he would fix the shipping problems? Biden signed Executive Order 14017, developing the “The Biden-Harris Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force” that developed a new policy. In coordination with this policy, any containers sitting on the dock longer than nine days being shipped by truck and 6 days for containers shipped by rail, will require importers to pay $100 per container and increasing in $100.00 increments per container per day, until the container leaves the terminal. This is called a “Dwell Fee” and was to take effect in October but got pushed to December 13th of last year. He is trying to force the importers into picking up their product faster.
I have a couple of friends that are importers. Believe me, they do not want their container sitting at the dock, and are impatiently waiting for them. This new policy is making a minor impact on shipping, but a large impact on the price we have to pay for the contents of that container. To make things worse, a second Dwell Fee is being implemented. Starting January 30, 2022, ocean carriers will be charged $100 for an empty container dwelling for nine days, increasing in $100 increments per container per day until the container leaves the terminal. I’m 100% sure these fees will be passed on to us.
The problem started when Biden began paying people to stay home. At the same time, Michigan’s Governor Whitmer lifted all requirements for receiving unemployment benefits allowing everybody to receive free money. Biden, Whitmer, and other Democratic governors programs of free money created a shortage of workers in lower paying jobs. This is one of them. The warehouses that unload these containers do not have enough employees, forcing the container to remain at the warehouse longer than normal. While that container sits at the warehouse, so does the carrier used to move that container. Containers do not have their own wheels and use a portable trailer to move it. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is a big contributor to the shipping problem. Without a way to move a container, it just sits and the fees add up. We also have a shortage of local delivery drivers moving product from that warehouse to the distributor, and then on to the retailer.
Biden would have you think he is doing such a good job of fixing the clean energy and shipping problems, but all he has done is generated higher prices on everything.
—Wally Maslowsky, Almont
