West Coast imports handle almost 50% of all U.S. maritime trade and more than 70% of the country’s Asian imports. The recent resolution to the West Coast import crisis came none to soon and on the surface, America averted a disaster of monumental proportions with regard to the settling of the West Coast port labor dispute. However, if Americans think they have totally averted disaster in the long-term, they are sadly mistaken. The backlog of goods will take weeks to months to offload. The impact on our economy will be felt for years and the severity of the crisis was completely avoidable.
Inescapable Consequences

The settlement may have come in the nick of time to avert an economic collapse, in the near term, however, America is not escaping unscathed from the import crisis.

Los Angeles and Long Beach port officials said “It will take weeks, if not months, just to clear the current backlog“. The dispute has reverberated throughout the U.S. economy, extending to agriculture, manufacturing, retail and transportation. The crisis has even hit consumers of French-fried potatoes at McDonald’s restaurants as far away as in Japan. Everyone from automakers to meat exporters are impacted by the failure of goods to flow from the ships to the retail outlets.

American consumers can expect to pay more for a car this summer as automakers were forced to turn to more expensive air freight to get parts to North American assembly lines. Japan’s Honda Motor said its Ohio plant would resume full activity by today (Tuesday) but its plants in Canada and Indiana would be kept at a far lower production level. This leads to layoffs at a time when the U.S. and Canadian worker cannot afford another attack upon employment rates. The backup at the West Coast ports cost Honda about 25,000 vehicles in lost production this month. Along a similar vein, Toyota and Nissan have reduced total man hours at its plants. Wal-Mart is reporting that the delays have caused spot shortages and that potential earnings have more than likely have been reduced which could result in lost jobs.

Americans can expect to pay more for beef in the upcoming months. U.S. meat exporters have had to put millions of pounds of beef and pork into cold storage and ship by air or use Canadian or Mexican ports. Food giants, such as Tyson Foods are among the leading U.S. pork and beef producers that had to fly its meat products to cold storage facilities in Mexico. Hold on to your wallets America when it comes to food prices and this comes at a time when one in six Americans are already experiencing “food vulnerability”.

As it seems to be with all economic crisis, the farmers take the worst of it and the impact shows up in the form of higher food prices. This import crisis has the potential to wreak havoc on the American food consumer as it is estimated that California farmers lost hundreds of millions of dollars in rotting crops at the ports and lost food production resulting from the crisis. This has a ripple effect through the economy resulting in a loss of food production jobs as well as food transport jobs.

In summary, American consumers can expect to pay far more for food and other essential commodities as a result of the import crisis. The impact of the import crisis could not have come at a worse time for many Americans who are experiencing extreme financial distress.
The True Impact of the Import Crisis Has Not Yet Been Felt

Thirty-seven percent of Americans have credit card debt that equals or is greater than their emergency savings, according to a new survey, leaving them “teetering on the edge of financial disaster.”

A recent poll of more than 1,000 people in the United States by Bankrate.com found that 37% of Americans have credit card debt that is greater than their emergency savings. Another 13% have neither credit card debt nor emergency savings. In other words, many Americans have no margin for error. So, as the import crisis and its economic effects cascade across the country, over a third of the country has no means to weather the storm that will reverberate in the U.S. over the next six to nine months.

American Express reported in a 2014 survey that emergencies are more frequent than many would like to think. Over 50% of the Americans who responded to the survey had to deal with major unforeseen or emergency expenses in the past year. Americans said these crises included unexpected health expense (44%) and auto repair (46%). Soon, we are going to be talking about food prices as the next unplanned crisis.

Students are likely to impacted as well as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported last week that the quantity of student loans in the US overdue by 90 days or more has risen to 11.3%. Students, who are completing their studies and beginning to pay off their student loans have no margin for error. The victims are being lined up and soon they will be mowed down by economic forces beyond their control.

much more:

http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2015/02/24/obama-lying-west-coast-import-crisis-latent-effects-will-crush-america/