It can always get worse.  Those words were shared with me by a friend 20 years ago.  I had just lost a job, broken my left leg and my wife had filed for divorce.  All in the span of six weeks and I was showing him my fiberglass left sock and joked things couldn’t get any worse.  A few years earlier, he had lost his job, and then at Christmas, his wife had suddenly died.  Shortly thereafter his future son-in-law died.

We’ve been through a lot in the last two years.  The so-called pandemic and media-generated panic.  The economy has been a rollercoaster.  No, we’re facing stagflation and possibly World War Three.

A Warning From an Insider

See the Facebook post above?  It’s from a guy from my old high school.  I didn’t know him well.  He was several years younger.  My younger brother knew both John and his older brother.

John became a truck driver.  It’s not easy work.  The country had a shortage even before our decade of crisis opened with the arrival of President Joe Biden.  Two weeks ago, John announced he would be parking his truck.  This followed a week where his expenses were 13 dollars more than his income.  When I mentioned we were paying nearly 5.50 a gallon for diesel, he replied in California and New York it was approaching $7.00 a gallon.  One of his last stops on the road was in Coeur d’Alene.

Dark Days Ahead

As he explained in his social media post, other drivers are rapidly throwing in the towel.  He predicts we’ll be seeing wide-scale food shortages before summer and it may last into next year.  Of course, the government will then likely reward the large carriers for getting things back on track, but the lease and owner-operated drivers will no longer be competitors.

It can always get worse.

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