Why the cost increase?

oldhvymec

You did the classic "I don't like the guy so anything good he did must have been fake" bit. Sorry, but Clinton had 4 balanced budgets and even ran a surplus. It wasn't fake and he and Kasich deserve the credit. Just because Bush II came along and blew that out of the water by starting two wars doesn't mean Clinton doesn't deserve credit.

Supply and Demand with too many at home doing all those projects around the house that have been sitting there for ten or more years. 

I was talking with my hardwood supplier about this. I build furniture and very soon audio furniture. Madronetimbre.com. More about that later.

In any event, my hardwood supplier indicated plywood, MDF, oak and maple are going up in price.

Most of it is construction materials, however. Word to this large hardwood distributor is that the mills aren't working full shifts due to Covid concerns and a majority of employees in those industries refusing to get vaccinated. As such, the mills aren't letting the unvaxed in to get the rest of them sick. Most of these plants are located in the Southeast and aren't air conditioned. At the same time, they aren't all out in open space / air either. 

Hopefully by a year from now, this dilemma will be behind us. 

Three New Unemployment Programs Under the CARES ActProgramWhat it DoesFederal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC)Provides a federal benefit of $300 a week up to Sept. 6, 2021.*Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA)Extends benefits to self-employed, freelancers, and independent contractors.

&

President Donald Trump on Sunday backed off his veto threat and signed the $900 billion stimulus bill—a move that should immediately benefit millions of unemployed Americans, even if its $600 checks have been roundly criticized as insufficient relief for the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic.

For starters, the package will bring back weekly enhanced federal unemployment benefits for the more than 19 million Americans still on unemployment benefit rolls. These enhanced benefits will pay out $300 per week, on top of state benefits, for up to 11 weeks. That’s down from the $600 weekly payment that the CARES Act sent jobless Americans through late July.

There was only 4 months of $600 UI. The rest was $300 until now.
Gotta love all the fuzzy math. But hey, how ’bout 85% of CARES money going to corporations who use it to buy back stock to increase their shares values so when they leave, they can cash out on the highest rate? They didn’t even qualify for the aid!

Others gave themselves bonuses and still laid off employees when they didn’t have to. And, a lot of those companies didn’t qualify for the money but "informed" there favorite politicians to simply give it to them. They were given a heads up as the bill was being written so as to be the first to apply and crowded out the small business owners that were to be the actual recipients of the aid.

Knowing how to bilk taxpayers is their specialty and they were the first to line up to the trough for the money. That money was supposed to help small companies retain employees by making the workplace safer and keeping companies afloat during shutdown when they couldn’t feasibly do it.

Why, oh why, do they always pick on the workers?

All the best,
Nonoise

Be patient; Covid

Right. This is why the price of a bushel of corn was flat for over 200 years from 1650 well into the 1800's, but has climbed inexorably higher ever since 1913, and in particular since 1971.  

The Federal Reserve and the income tax were both created in 1913. Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971.  

Be patient; Covid. Hilarious.

Be patient: Covid, is correct. 

A lot of this can be put at the foot of JIT (Just In Time) and it's implementation in the early '80s. Instead of warehousing parts, supplies, sundries, etc., manufacturers discovered that, like their Japanese counterparts who did this in the '70s, they could cut down on costs by closing down those warehouses and lay off the few employees it would take to manage them and keep the money saved for themselves.

The problem was, and still is, Japan is nowhere near as large as America and can very well afford to implement such a thing. And all it took was a pandemic to bring the whole thing down. Like others have said, we have backlogs of container ships out there with some crews never seeing land for well over a year. 

JIT has been exposed for the cheap, cost cutting tactic that it always was. It very well have been the first domino to fall and the rest, as they say, is history.

All the best,
Nonoise