Greg... first you say government shouldn't be involved, then you tell us truckers should get together and vote. I'm guessing you're talking about getting ppl in who support the Fair Tax, which I don't agree with BTW.
T-Hawk, I would be interested in why you don’t agree with it, another time. I think that what we have today is the worst form of government intervention ever created next to outright Stalinism. If you have an inclining into the effects of progressive and punitive taxes on our world, then you may agree change is better than no change. Going from a flat tax, to a income tax back to a flat tax with deductions defeats the purpose of any real gains needed to save the economy and bring investment back into the country. There is no justification that we have to see money go off shore in the form of jobs and capital and most if not all of this has to directly and indirectly with taxes. The enterprise zones are tax free by the way, and if you know how many companies are in those zones on the border, you can see that taxes has something to do with them being there.
Yes Vote but going a little beyond that. Recently I have been looking at groups that have people involved in them who have no real stake in the focus of the group, but they are effective in their pursing of change. Environmental groups for one amaze me that they can pull together people to complain, to write, to visit in mass about some insignificant issue and get press time, get attention from politicians but outside of the fact that not one thing that they are fighting to change impacts them directly. I have not seen anything except talk of strikes and crying for the ‘good ‘ol days’.
I see it this way... government regulates how many trains run in this country, as there are only so many tracks. They also regulate business to restrict monopolies and collusion. They've already regulated (by deregulation) trucking so much, we make a fraction of what we did in the 70s.
The regulation of the rail industry is an entirely different issue but sort the same. What I mean is the government allowed the building of the rail system, from day one they used their power to make land grants, to promote rail and to regulate it for the betterment of the country. But we also have today a parallel in the sense that the government built the interstates and regulate them, they give the states money and allow them to take more money to maintain them with fuel taxes – which they do not really do. My point is if we are to help truckers, than we must insist that the federal government only allocates the money to the roads for the use of the roads and nothing else. They should not allow toll roads or any other restrictions to interstate commerce, like through emission standards. The price of a mile of road may vary from state to state by only so much but in fact the roads are built the same and the taxes should be about the same that the states receive. There should be no short fall with the revenue that is being produced and if there is, then the states should not put up toll roads but be more fiscally responsible. See what I am saying?
Why not regulate vulture brokers? Or set brokers to flat fees rather than rate/mile? There is such a thing as anti-trust in this country, and I think a lot of brokers break the laws in what they do. Business is supposed to be a risk/reward venture. More and more we're seeing reward for unscrupulous brokers who don't have any risk involved. Get rid of anything beyond the first broker, and wallah... we have profit again!
I don’t think regulating brokers is an answer, just like I don’t believe that having a tax on domestic oil companies is any solution.
For some reason someone is taking the freight, for some reason there are people out there making the money. The problem is that in order for the brokers to operate, someone has to take the load. There is absolutely no cohesion on the part of the truckers to begin with, so why should anyone expect that regulating the source of the work would work?
Where is the collusion?
Where is the anti-trust?
Anti-trust laws are dead in this country, look at the banking industry, look at Microsoft.
We are not talking about Standard Oil paying the railroads rebates here; we are talking about a lot of individual companies who are moving freight at prices that seem to be competitive in a semi-closed marketplace. Again, no one is forcing anyone to take the freight, are they? They are not setting any standard in rates, there is no back room meeting taking place where they decide “today, let’s lower the rate for freight going from NYC to LA to .98¢ a mile”. I don’t see a pattern on rates saying this ton per mile only gets X dollars, is there one?
BUT I will say this, I was told a little factoid in my quest for answers that the really big carriers, I mean the guys who have a stake in all of this across the board like Brown and FedEx and I really never thought about it until then. They see a big gap being created by the competitive nature of the industry and the displacement of the O/Os through more competition within the field. They see what the lack of cohesion is doing, the lack of concern with the public and they are moving to fill the gap. They have been capturing more of the freight that is falling onto these boards and putting them on their own trucks which they already operate pretty much as a fix cost per mile.
