New restrictions on who can drive?

With increasing usage of marijuana among millenials and gen z, as well as the high average age of truck drivers, should we encourage ongoing marijuana legalization and use since that would limit the pool of available truck drivers, and by the law of supply and demand drive up wages and rates?

I'm thinking an organization should target 21-somethings who have clean driving records in legal-weed states offering them free samples of marijuana from the local dispensary. If we can turn them into habitual marijuana users, they won't be able to compete w/ us for truck driving jobs and loads and drive down rates!

I feel we should also encourage the federal government to once again ban diabetic drivers, w/ NO exemptions, and impose a BMI limit on drivers, perhaps at 30 which is the cut-off for obese? This would also work to limit the supply.

Mandatory "mental health tests" to exclude anyone with PTSD or a history of diagnosis of ADHD (for safety reasons, of course!) could supplement this.

We *must* keep the driving age at 21, if not raise it to 25 which is the "neural maturity limit" established by neuroscience, and perhaps impose a minimum residency requirement on immigrants of 5-10 years. Arbitrary restrictions on *anyone* with a felony or misdeamenor could also serve to limit the pool of drivers further.

All of these measures I feel would result in the already severe shortage getting much, much worse. It would drive up pay, and if we can make self-driving trucks too much of a legal liability, perhaps unions could help us lobby against them? We could make the 100k a year average salary a thing again now and forever! If companies have nobody to hire, they'll be desperate to pay whatever it takes and the shippers/receivers will have no choice but to take the hit, and pass it onto consumers.

Elizabeth Warren spoke about breaking up Google, that's our ticket to kill off autonomous vehicles right there!

Consumers will pay the price, but hey, that's what the govt' is there to do!
What do you all think? It's for safety of course, but it'd help our salaries too! I know it sounds cronyist, but that's what hiring lobbyists is all about. In fact, that's what the ATA and Teamsters and even OOIDA have been doing for decades!

 

No no no! You don't get it: I'm saying all of these things are safety related, but would have the effect of preventing so many people from becoming or remaining truck drivers, that wages would have to drastically rise as companies desperately scramble to fill seats.

It would force something like 95% of current drivers out of the industry, and prevent at least 60% of the population from even *considering* driving a truck!

If we limit the supply, and demand stays the same, wages will increase!

 

I'm taking a devil's advocate approach here to solving the problem of driver pay, btw.

 

It was an amusing thought I had...

I think wages would go up for a while until they could figure out how to get autonomous trucks to work.

Of course if the government were willing to ban anybody fat from driving, why wouldn't they just ban self-driving trucks as to dangerous? Take some money from a union that stands to lose workers, and say it's for safety!

No I think this would permanently increase wages and also cripple the economy.