Shannon Newton
President, ATA
Dominating another media cycle, Taylor Swift dropped a new album (or two if you count the 2 a.m. surprise bonus tracks). The tortuous lyrics reveal that the records she broke, the millions, even billions, of dollars earned, the tour, the movie, the costumes, the success of her sparkly summer by every metric were all in sharp contrast to the struggles of her personal life during that same time.
In similar dichotomy, the U.S. economy appears to be growing stronger; the metrics tell us that we are at full employment, steady economic growth, inflation has slowed to historical norms and the recession economists once predicted has not materialized, but the trucking industry continues to sputter.
There’s the disconnect between what we feel about the economy, our own personal and business experiences, and how the whole system is holding up. In this very issue, we’ve asked economists to explain what is happening. But you also have insights on what it’s like in your communities, at your businesses, in your own homes. What is affordable and what isn’t; What is still profitable and what is increasingly not; what is scarce that used to be plentiful?
It’s a mistake to not acknowledge that while the economy may have come out of the pandemic without collapsing, we are not living in the roaring ‘20s. As our incoming chairman and Maverick President John Culp recognizes in his profile, things have been tough for carriers for the last two years.
But we have a community for times such as these. Is it any wonder that our association was founded in 1932, when our country was in the middle of the worst economic depression we’ve ever experienced? Unpredictability, turmoil, trucking’s “doom loop” (as Bloomberg described the cycle of weak demand, slumping prices and rising costs) is not something we want our members to experience on their own. The reason we’ve been coming together at an annual conference for 90-something years is because there is power in association.
The connections we make inside the industry understand the gap between what happens on the economic stage and how it feels to keep on trucking behind the scenes. Our experiences inside this economy are just as valid as the 1000-ft view indicating that things will eventually be okay again.
If Taylor’s taught us anything though, it can be therapeutic to vent about the tortured moments in our industry, too.
