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The Daily 202
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By <a href="
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/olivier-knox/">Olivier Knox</a> By Olivier Knox
with research by Mariana Alfaro
Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1947, President Harry S. Truman gave the first televised presidential address from the White House. He asked Americans to conserve food to provide emergency aid to famine-hit Europe. (First president to win an Emmy, though? That would be Dwight D. Eisenhower.)
The big idea
Biden has a Christmas problem. And it's not Anthony Fauci
President Biden has a Christmas problem. And it has nothing to do with Anthony S. Fauci saying on Sunday that he doesn’t know yet whether it’ll be safe in 80 days for families to get together to celebrate, then backtracking a day later.
Biden’s problem is this: Severely disrupted global supply chains sending prices skyward (and not in Santa’s sleigh), playing havoc with inventory, and potentially making it harder for Americans to be certain they’ll have the desired presents come the holidays.
Or, as my colleague David Lynch recently put it: “The commercial pipeline that each year brings $1 trillion worth of toys, clothing, electronics and furniture from Asia to the United States is clogged and no one knows how to unclog it.”
Biden’s core promise to voters in 2020 was that he would be a steady hand, singularly focused on smothering the pandemic and reviving the economy. The soaring death toll from the Delta coronavirus variant, and the ensuing economic sputters, have tested that vow, and holiday strains could fray it further. And the president’s economic agenda faces an uncertain fate in Congress, where Democrats are puzzling out how to avoid a default on debt payments in the face of a lockstep GOP refusal to help.
So, how clogged is that pipeline? CBS LA reported Monday that “as many as half a million shipping containers on cargo ships off the ports of LA and Long Beach, waiting to be offloaded.”
And the cost of renting those containers has soared, David noted. “This month, the median cost of shipping a standard rectangular metal container from China to the West Coast of the United States hit a record $20,586, almost twice what it cost in July, which was twice what it cost in January, according to the Freightos index.”
