Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/757641
PULSE December 2016 | Overdrive | 5 By Max Heine Editorial director mheine@randallreilly.com Based on two Overdrive pre-election polls, three out of four owner-operators voted for President-elect Donald Trump. No doubt one reason is that, in solidarity with Trump's Rust Belt supporters, they want good jobs to stay in or return to America. In the Nov. 21 video outline of his first-100- days plan, Trump seemed less strident on the isolationism and nativism that appealed to so many voters. He said the U.S. will withdraw from negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Part- nership, replacing it with "fair bilateral trade deals." After campaigning that he would scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement if he couldn't do a major renegotiation of it, he simply omitted NAFTA in his outline. But do trade agreements that reduce or eliminate most tariffs really hurt our economy? A 2012 University of Chicago Booth School of Business survey asked economists of widely different leanings if Americans were better off because of NAFTA. Yes, said 95 percent of respondents. Only 5 percent were unsure. No one said no. It's simple: Lower tariffs under NAFTA allow us to buy and sell more goods. More im- portantly for trucking, trade in either direction means freight. It's estimated that 700,000 jobs have been lost to NAFTA – but that's over 15 years, says Jacob Goldstein of the Planet Money pod- cast. This year, U.S. job growth has averaged 181,000 jobs per month. Last year, it was 229,000 per month. Over those 15 years, jobs have disappeared for different reasons: automation, the weaken- ing of unions, an educational system that fails in workplace training, and other causes. But as for the net effect of NAFTA, it's not the principal culprit. U.S. interests are integrated with Mexico and other countries in ways that aren't as visi- bly newsworthy as a shuttered factory. Almost 40 percent of what we import from Mexico originates from U.S. sources, wrote Walter Kemmsies, chief economist at the Moffatt Nichol consultancy, in a 2014 article. He estimated that figure was less than 5 percent 20 years earlier. "A lot of jobs were created in the U.S. that wouldn't be there without the Mexico trade," says Wharton School of Finance professor Mauro Guillen. Following its pilot program for cross-border trucking, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration two years ago began accepting applications from Mexico-based haulers for operating authority. Now Mexican carriers are allowed to lease equipment to U.S. entities. Many U.S. truckers have feared the impending hordes of reckless Mexican drivers and the loss of U.S. driving jobs, but so such concerns ap- pear overblown and misplaced. You could say the same for Trump's rhetoric about isolat- ing us from trading partners who have helped fuel America's economic engines, including the trucking industry. Trade winds The president-elect's rhetoric about isolating us from trading partners doesn't serve the interests of trucking. Too much power for chiropractors? Chiropractors can perform DOT physicals as long as they put forth the effort to be included in FMCSA's National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners. All well and good, but driver Bob Stanton, cofounder of sleep ap- nea support group Truckers for a Cause, notes a curious fact about FMCSA's Medical Review Board and what the board's sleep apnea screening and testing recommendations would allow chiropractors to do. "The Medical Review Board has no members board-certified in sleep medicine," Stanton commented in Overdrive's Trucking Pro LinkedIn group. "They also ignored comments submitted by medical groups like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the American Sleep and Breathing Academy." The MRB also kept an item in its draft recommendations that allows a DOT medical examiner to send a patient who's had one of the home sleep tests back for a more-expensive in-lab test if the examiner "determines that the in-home sleep study is inadequate." While the language also notes that the examiner should consult with the sleep specialist to make such a determination, Stanton believes the language essentially "allows a chiro- practor to overrule a medical doctor board-certified in sleep medicine and require retesting with the most expensive form of testing. … It will be very interesting to see the cost-ef- fectiveness analysis for this." If it ever gets there. Such analysis would come with a rulemaking, and given the con- siderable work that goes into a rulemaking and consideration of its potential impacts, FMCSA has a long way to go before it gets to that stage.