America needs truck drivers! We’re about 25,000 short right now, and we’ll need hundreds of thousands of them in the future, according to Bloomberg Business. But where are they? Well, they’re all over the place, but they aren’t willing to spend their lives on the road working for about $38,000 a year.
If that’s the case, the solution is simple. If proffered wages aren’t sufficient to attract qualified employees, then wages should rise, shouldn’t they? Yeah, that’s what Econ 101 says. But that’s not what American business says. If people were starving to death, they’d be begging for the chance to spend the best years of their lives muscling 12-ton rigs over mountains and across deserts, through rain, snow, and sleet, not to mention rush hour traffic. Yeah, they would, but unfortunately for “big business” they aren’t starving to death, and so employers will have to pay the real “going wage,” and not the imagined one.
