"General Public" and a strike. HELP!!!

well just keep on raising the rates there driver, everything i own is paid for. i have enough property that i can make myself self-sufficient. won't take much more convincing for me, i could care less. i just hate to see people less fortunate suffer.

 

I haul dry van freight that is regional..

Now I have given a solution to the problem, but some of you don't like my solution to the problem as it seems not good enough.

Now here is my question towards you.

Are we supposed to work for free so the needy can afford grocries?

 

i'm sorry, i must have missed that post so i didn't see your solution. and no, you shouldn't work for free, you got into business to make money and you should do just that. however, you can overprice yourself out of a job if you're not careful just ask some of these UAW members that are jobless right now. how about cutting costs? i'm in the process of drawing up plans to make my own diesel fuel. should be able to make it for less than $1.00 a gallon. perhaps with saving that much money on my fuel expense i could underbid your rate and start hauling your freight. wouldn't be very nice of me, but after all it's just being a good businessman right.

 

Good for you! Maybe you should just forget about trucking and get on with other things. Seems to me you have a real nack to be a politician !

 

totally true....you always have to go by market and its value...for example i've hauled fresh sea food from WA to FL for 2.30 a mile for 4 yrs, since diesel went up we tried to up the rate a little and customer didn't like too much and went with a broker who finds him trucks for 1.80 a mile, now instead of getting 4 loads a week at 2.50 a mile i get now only 1 load and customer simply telling me that FL people dont buy as much fish anymore eventhough i know other carries that loaded same product going to same consignee #1.80 a mile...same for your dry van freight...i dont care if you haul rubber Trojans....if one rubber gonna cost me 50 bucks im gonna go look else where or better yet use a sock lol....but guess what your rubbers aint gonna move cause nobody gonna buy them.

 

So welcome to business in a free market.

Let's see, you researched, learned the necessary business skills, and decided to invest your time and money into a business that had a specialty hauling say fish. After 4 years, your customer decided that in spite of your 4 years relationship, he would be satisfied with the unknown services of brokered trucks at a lower price. This is a common story in this industry.

There are variations that change only in the type of load hauled, dirt, construction fill and waste, paper towels, fresh produce.. you name it.

So what is your answer? Limit the number of competitors you have to deal with through regulation? Set government controls on pricing of everything including condoms?

In China they have government controls on the price of fuel, their truckers have several times this year found themselves sitting hours in line to get the alloted 10 liters of fuel they were rationed to.. ( I have seen calls for rationing already on this board).. I bet that sitting over and over in line for a day and a half to get enough fuel to make a short trip would make the trucking business just as hard to make a living in as dealing with high fuel prices.. Of course possibly with bribes some Chinese drivers are able to fill up anyway, in which case their problems are more similar to ours?

We Americans have a free market economy. The challenges to a small business operator are great, but in fact the challenges to a small business trucker under any system are great.

I prefer this system myself.

I could reply specifically about your experience being undercut by a broker after 4 years with a customer. You probably would take offense at my response tho.. It is not a unique experience.

 

maybe, ya just never know, i don't think they'd let me hang around in washington very long though. cause i'd carry a big stick with me, and i'd probably have to take some of them folks up there behind the woodshed.

 

I REMEMBER THE CLASS OF 94 , they were gonna enact term limits and stop the graft etc... most of them are still in office.

I believe in the history of Washington D C politics you can find a few examples of MEN ( women too maybe but they are newer on the scene) who ran for congress, went to Washington, and then refused to continue running because they refused to fall into the old boy network.

Unfortunately unless we can replace a great number of congressmen with fresh faces and ideas, nothing seems likely to change there.

It is past time for a third party to become powerful enough to elect congressmen and Senators and then who knows... futile one man ventures into Washington seem to have resulted in nothing so far.

 

i think you should run for office, we need some people that have some plain old common horsesense. run on the fairtax platform if your rival isn't and you'll get a lot more votes than you think.

 

Unfortunately for your plan, I do not believe in the "fair tax" plan at all.. I lived in several countries that pretended to tax all transactions instead of income. The poor who had to buy tax stamps and affix them to all receipts before they could collect paid the lions share of taxes, the rich simply lived paperless for most part. The consumption as a percentage of income for the poor was such a higher percentage of all available income. The poor had to buy subsistence and pay taxes, the rich simply leased or borrowed from each other..LOL.

The government as established by our ancestors was supposed to subsist in minimum fashion on excise and import taxes.. Today we tax working class Americans, and allow cheap imports in duty free... George Washington would be in Washington D C inviting politicians out behind the capital building with a second and matched dueling pistols or a horse whip..( that was still legal in his day)

I (if I could form a political party) would urge the complete stoppage of all taxation on Americans and American businesses and move the entire government revenue stream back where the founding fathers expected it would always be, on those people bringing in from other parts of the world to sell here.

( that won't win me any support from big business LOL) Sam Waltons children would be taking contracts out on me...LOL

BTW you may not be aware, but I did pretend to campaign for the presidency last election because I could not back G W Bush nor the other guy at all.. I wrote myself in.. You should see my foreign policy statements about the U N.. LOL I am not a John Bircher, but when it comes to the UN you might suspect I was.. So maybe you wouldn't think I have "common sense" if you really knew me....LOL