Truck Drivers Are Being Wiped Out. . . .

There is nothing more vital to the nation’s economy than the state of the trucking industry. Trucking is the nuts and bolts and the moving parts of the economic body whole. Almost everything you stand over at the check out line has gotten to your cart via the transportation industry in this country.

Without trucking, this nation would come to an immediate stand still. Even goods that come by rail, have to make it to the shelves in the stores, restaurants and offices. Trucking is one of the most important arteries in the heart of our nation’s economy. A lot of people will point to Wall Street as a gauge to tell you how the economy is doing. However, if you want a true measure of the state of the union, all you have to do is examine the transportation industry.

Using this measuring stick, you will find that the story of the “Great Recession” and the real state of our economical stasis. Before the economic collapse of 2008, there were six million people who held a specialized license called a “Class A CDL” who were the people who moved everything around in this country. At the time, the economy was experiencing a shortage of truck drivers, to the tune of six hundred thousand short of what was needed for our nation.

The government was running television commercials, saying we had this massive job shortage and was giving out government grants to pay people to go to commercial driving school. It got so bad and desperate, that there was pressure on the schools to cut their eight week classes down to five or six weeks, just to push out drivers faster. A lot of people remember the safety issues that arose from this kind of pressure. Nevertheless, that is what most of the schools did and “still” there weren’t enough drivers in this country.

Now fast forward post economic collapse and we have a much different picture of the transportation industry. America is not making anything anymore. Manufacturing has been outsourced to third world nations and the American tax code has driven even the most patriotic companies to move their jobs overseas. As of today, almost a third of all truckers have been put out of work. Trucking companies have collapsed like dominos and the ones still standing, are hanging on by a thread.

The economy shrank so drastically, that millions of truckers have been put out of work. There is no work for them and they now face the biggest threat to their survival ever.

The insurance companies that insure trucks are telling most all of the trucking companies in our nation, that they won’t insure anyone who has not driven a truck in the last six months. This one act has wiped out millions of people’s long trucking careers. People who have driven a truck for twenty or thirty years are now being told that all that experience means nothing and they can no longer get a job, because they haven’t driven in the last six months. Their entire trucking careers are being rendered worthless and they are being wiped out each and every day.

Try to imagine if you would, a trucker who drove for twenty years, his company folded and closed the doors. He can’t find a job for six months and when one opens up, he is being told he can not work because the insurance company won’t insure him. This represents the complete extinction of the careers of millions of people. There is no logic to it and the whole scam of this insurance practice is gone unnoticed.

No one sees this or even understands what a clear and present danger this represents to these people and our nation as a whole. How on Earth are these people to get a job when their entire work history is being erased by the insurance industry? Why has this gone un-noticed in the press and who is speaking on behalf of all these Americans, who due to no fault of their own, lost their job and now their entire career?

When it became clear that our unemployment problem was going to be a never before seen, long term problem, Alan Greenspan went around the talk shows saying how he was afraid people would lose their skills. I remember watching him say this and thinking what crap that was. Yes, people would get rusty, but for the most part, people’s jobs are like riding a bike.
 
What I didn’t realize and maybe Greenspan did, was that it wasn’t so much people losing their skills, but corporate executives in their Ivory Towers, who would declare that people lost their skill. These truckers still know how to drive a tractor-trailer, but some suit in some insurance office somewhere declared that all these people forgot how to drive. Every stinking day in this country, some executive or politician just puts another nail in the coffin of this nation.

How we have allowed, as a nation, so many of these bastards to destroy so many American families, is beyond me. Things have gotten so far out of control that the survival of the American Family is not some futuristic theory in some movie, but rather the axiomatic reality that stares us in the face each and everyday. Well, I hope congress is enjoying their spring break!

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Just another example where the "government solution" = catastrophe

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