Truck driver shortage is driving up prices for many goods. A sign that a strong U.S. economy is starting to overheat?


A student practices hooking an 18-wheeler up to a trailer during a commercial driver’s license class at Lake Cumberland CDL Training School in Mount Sterling, Ky., in June 2014. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News)
Heather Long reports for The Washington Post:
Joyce Brenny, chief executive of Brenny Transportation in Minnesota, gave her truck drivers a 15 percent raise this year, but she still can’t find enough workers for a job that now pays $80,000 a year.
A year ago, when customers would call Brenny, she could almost always get their goods loaded on a truck and moving within a day or two. Now she’s warning customers it could take two weeks to find an available truck and driver.
Shipping costs have skyrocketed in the United States in 2018, one of the clearest signs yet of a strong economy that might be starting to overheat. Higher transportation costs are beginning to cause prices of anything that spends time on a truck to rise. Amazon, for example, just implemented a 20 percent hike for its Prime program that delivers goods to customers in two days, and General Mills, the maker of Cheerios and Betty Crocker, said prices of some of its cereals and snacks are going up because of an “unprecedented” rise in freight costs. Tyson Foods, a large meat seller, and John Deere, a farm and construction equipment, also recently announced they will increase prices, blaming higher shipping costs.

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Donald Trump wants the PSEG Nuclear subsidy bill vetoed

By Frank Brill
EnviroPolitics Editor


That’s right. The president is urging New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to veto–or make substantial changes to–the bill sitting his Trenton desk that would deliver a very generous, taxpayer-funded subsidy to PSEG’s still profitable, nuclear- generation facilities.


At least, that’s what the president, pictured above and appropriately to the left, is urging. You might know him better as actor Alec Baldwin who has been satirizing the president, pictured above and surely on the right, in weekly Saturday Night Live skits.  

In an op-ed in the Asbury Park Press, President Baldwin-Trump writes:


Gov. Phil Murphy has pledged an all-renewable energy future for New Jersey by 2050. He is to be commended.

But, that goal won’t be achieved by doling out $300 million annually to PSEG and Exelon to bail out the Salem/Hope Creek nukes in Salem County as proposed by a bill overwhelmingly approved by the Democratic-controlled New Jersey Legislature. Those millions would come from ordinary citizens paying their electric bill.  

That’s money that could otherwise be used to implement a clean energy future that would pull the state’s energy needs away from climate-changing fossil fuels and nuclear energy, which generates thousands of pounds of lethal, highly radioactive waste — the exact same mix of poisons found in atomic bombs.

I’m adding my voice to the chorus of outrage that has risen against this preposterous ratepayer-funded bailout. We know what this is about. It’s a shell game to guarantee an unfair 18-percent annual return to investors on the backs of ratepayers. And it’s New Jersey money that the companies could use to prop up their out-of-state nukes.


Why is a New York City resident involving himself? 

The Trump stand-in explains:
I’ve been involved in issues related to reducing reliance on nuclear power since the late 1980s. I have a long association with the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP), a nonprofit research group that tracks cancer rates around nuclear plants. I have also immersed myself in studying the effects of exposure to continuous low-level radiation, the type of which is emitted from nuclear plants.







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Opinion: Bill Bradley, it’s time to call your bookie


Andrew Peter Napolitano, a native of Newark, NJ, is a syndicated columnist whose work appears in numerous publications, such as Fox News, The Washington Times, and Reason. He is a senior judicial analyst for Fox News, commenting on legal news and trials.


In 1992, Congress passed a statute authored by then-Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who was a former Princeton University and New York Knicks basketball superstar, prohibiting the states from authorizing sports betting. At that time, gambling in Atlantic City was flourishing, and notwithstanding one of its own senators’ efforts to keep gambling away from competitive sports, the state of New Jersey wanted to duplicate Las Vegas’ success with sports betting.

When Bradley’s legislation grandfathered the state of Nevada, legislators in New Jersey came up with an idea to get around the federal legislation that would permit Atlantic City casinos to compete with those in Las Vegas by repealing all laws about sports betting, thereby escaping the federal prohibition on “authorizing” sports betting. It would be up to the casinos to set up their own betting parlors for college and professional sports, and in so doing, they could increase their own bottom lines and thus the state’s tax revenues.
When major professional sports leagues and the NCAA challenged this, a federal district court in Newark read the “thou shalt not authorize” language to mean “thou shalt not permit under any circumstances.” That ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, and New Jersey appealed its case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in its favor earlier this week.
Get ready to call your bookie.
The Supreme Court decision reinforces the anti-commandeering jurisprudence of the 10th Amendment, which was dormant from the New Deal era to the mid-1990s. Recall that the states formed the federal government, not the other way around. When they did so, they delegated certain areas of governmental authority to the feds, and as new states were added to the Union, they did the same.
The 10th Amendment is the constitutional recognition of the truism that the legislative powers that the states did not delegate to Congress they retained for themselves.
The anti-commandeering jurisprudence prohibits Congress from telling the states how to govern or legislate or spend their tax dollars in any governmental areas not delegated to the Congress. This congressional practice was condemned in a case called Printz v. United States, in which Congress had ordered state law enforcement officials to establish certain gun registration protocols consistent with congressional standards and made state legislatures pay for the enforcement of the protocols.
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The tax break package the Kushners want from Jersey City

Terrence T. McDonald reports for the Jersey Journal
The development firm run by Jared Kushner’s family sought a 30-year tax break from Jersey City and about $9 million in city-issued bonds for its troubled One Journal Square project, a newly released document shows.

Kushner Companies and partner KABR Group, which want to build twin 56-story towers on a long-vacant lot near the Journal Square PATH station, asked the city for the long-term tax break package in an April application obtained by The Jersey Journal after a public-records request.
The document was submitted two weeks before the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency told the developers, in a letter obtained by Hudson County View, that they were in default of their 2015 redeveloper agreement with the agency, in part because construction on the $897 million project did not start by Jan. 1, 2017.
Mayor Steve Fulop said on Twitter last month that the subsidy request illustrated the developers’ “sense of entitlement.” A request for comment from a Kushner Companies spokeswoman was not returned.

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Pallone wants White House to release PFCs report


New Jersey has some of strictest standards in country for regulating the contaminants, but environmentalist says DEP’s regulation process has slowed

water quality test
Jon Hurdle reports for NJ Spotlight

Lawmakers and environmentalists are urging the federal government to release a report recommending tight new limits on a class of chemicals that New Jersey is playing a leading role in regulating.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry indicated it is preparing to release a study saying that the PFC family of chemicals (perfluorochemicals), also known as PFAS, should be subject to much tighter restrictions than those advocated — but not required — by the Environmental Protection Agency.
That prompted officials at the EPA and the White House to warn of a public relations “nightmare” as they anticipated a clash between federal agencies over a matter of public health, according to emails obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists and recently published by some media outlets and advocacy groups.
U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), on Wednesday accused the White House of blocking the ATSDR study, and called for its release.
“Families throughout our country have a right to know about dangerous contaminants in their drinking water,” Pallone said in a statement. “The White House has once again shown that it cares more about public relations than public health by burying an HHS study that shows a class of toxic chemicals endanger human health at far lower levels than EPA previously considered safe.”


Pallone will ‘do everything’ to get report released

“While I am pleased that New Jersey already has standards close to the ATSDR recommendation, I will work with my colleagues on the Energy and Commerce Committee and throughout Congress to do everything within our power to ensure that the report is released,” Pallone said.
According to the internal EPA emails, White House officials expressed concern in January that tough new limits on PFCs were due to be proposed by the ATSDR, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services. Since ATSDR’s limits for two of the chemicals would be as much as 10 times lower than the advisory issued by EPA, that would be tough to explain to the public, according to one of the emails from an unnamed official at the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.


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Your views sought on revised Delaware Estuary plan

Kate Layron writes for Partnership for the Delaware Estuary:
Things change after 20 years. Scientific research provides us with new knowledge about the Delaware Estuary. Storms and hurricanes like Sandy in 2012 have heightened our understanding and awareness of the potential impacts of climate change. The organizations and people working together to protect and enhance the Delaware Estuary have evolved too. Their goals and vision for working together remain strong, but new goals and strategies have developed. A newly revised comprehensive plan reflects both the PDE’s and the environment’s ebbs and flows.
Partnership for the Delaware Estuary invites comments on the revised draft Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for the Delaware Estuary (CCMP). This comment period runs from May 21 to July 20. PDE additionally will hold a webinar atnoon on Monday, June 11 to provide information on the CCMP revision process and how to comment.
The CCMP is the blueprint that will guide the work that PDE and its partners will undertake over the next 10 years or more as well as guide how funds from the National Estuary Program are used.  By revising this plan, the PDE and its partners are complying with federal regulations and lending a fresh perspective to its goals.
This the first revision to the CCMP, which originally was published in 1996. The original plan outlined 77 different actions on land and water, involving people and organizations in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It was a successful guide for more than 20 years, and the Delaware Estuary is showing clear signs of improvement as a result. As recently reported in PDE’s Technical report for the Delaware Estuary and Basin, (TREB), contaminants like PCBs are in decline, fish like striped bass are thriving, and there are new opportunities for people to enjoy waterfront areas.
But the TREB also shows that new strategies are needed. For example, it shows there are continued losses of wetlands and shellfish, with accelerated losses since 1996 in some cases. In response, PDE and others have developed new programs and activities like PDE’s freshwater mussel recovery initiative.
PDE held multiple phases of public outreach to engage scientists and other experts and stakeholders during the revision process, which started in 2016. This input was used to create the draft revised CCMP which includes 39 strategies for clean water, strong communities and healthy habitats. Clean water strategies focus on reducing pollution and ensuring plentiful water for the future. Strategies for strong communities focus on improving community access and resilience, and engaging people as environmental stewards. Those for healthy habitats focus on sustaining wetlands, forests and shellfish, particularly for their water filtering benefits. Education and involvement are weaved throughout the CCMP.
The Estuary spans from Trenton, New Jersey and Philadelphia to Lewes, Delaware. It relies on clean water from streams throughout the Delaware River Watershed, including those in the Delaware, Schuylkill, and Brandywine river valleys, and along the bay shores of Delaware and New Jersey.  The plan aims to make watershed improvements to benefit millions of people who live, work, and play in the tristate Delaware Valley. The Delaware Estuary is one of 28 estuaries of national importance in the United States identified by Congress and included in the National Estuary Program.
After public comments are received and any changes are made, the CCMP must go to PDE’s steering committee and the EPA for final approval and adoption. Along with a copy of the draft revised CCMP, a copy of the 1996 plan is available to view on the PDE website. To sign up for the webinar (or view it afterward), review the draft revised CCMP, or submit comments, visitwww.DelawareEstuary.org/our-plan.
 If you are unable to send your feedback through the online form or email, please mail your written comments to: Emily Baumbach, Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, Inc. 110 South Poplar St., Suite 202, Wilmington, DE 19801
**Tune in for our webinar on June 11** 
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