By A.G. Gancarski
FloridaPolitics.com
October 15, 2021
‘We don’t even know if the kids will get toys for Christmas.’
Supply chain snarls could grinch the Holiday Season, and Florida’s Governor is having no part of it.
Gov. Ron DeSantis got nasty in Niceville about potential threats to children, of which he has three of his own, not getting toys for Christmas because of issues with shipping and domestic imports.
“You see all of these problems with the shipping and not being able to get goods. We don’t even know if the kids will get toys for Christmas,” DeSantis said during comments unveiling a grant at Northwest Florida College in Okaloosa County.
DeSantis said Florida ports could “handle it” and “get things out,” echoing a push by the Florida Ports Council to increase activity at Florida ports in the wake of issues in California and elsewhere offloading imports.
The Governor said he was “concerned about some of the things you see coming out of Washington, all the inflation,” comments designed to resonate as inflation is at a 13 year high.
“We’re pushing in the right direction,” DeSantis said, and the state is positioned to “beat back some of those headwinds” of macroeconomic trends.
These comments, dire warnings about Christmas and giftless youth notwithstanding, are a measure more optimistic than previous comments about inflationary “headwinds” over which DeSantis said the state is powerless.
“Those are, I think, are beyond our control at the state level,” the Governor cautioned during a news conference in Bay County last Friday.
“And just building things, everything’s more expensive,” DeSantis groused. “People want to come and build homes here. It’s harder to build them because it’s harder to get the materials. It’s more expensive and everything.”
“They said that this was not going to be something that was sustained. Yet we see it. It’s sustained. It’s real,” DeSantis said.
These worries are nothing new for DeSantis. When signing the budget this summer, he warned of what was to come.
“And look, in the last 15 months, this federal government has added more to the debt than we’ve ever seen since World War II in such a short period of time. And my view on that is something’s got to be done. There’s got to be — the bill’s going to come due somehow. Whether it’s higher interest rates, higher inflation, I’m not sure, but it is a concern when you look around and see the gas prices.”
Unfortunately the supply-chain issues only start at the ports. Many of the major ports have reached or almost reached their capacity to offload containers due to a lack of trucks and train rail cars to move the containers out of the port and on to the distribution centers or final destinations. A recent poll of CEOs of manufacturing and goods in the mid-Atlantic states revealed that they don’t believe there will be significant relief from this problem until mid-2022. While the “no toys” is headline sensationalism to some degree, the reality is there are major shortages of some consumer goods as well as raw and finished materials required in the manufacturing sector.