After reading Kwame Onwuachi’s and Alice Waters’s op-ed in the Washington Post, I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Its caption caught my eye: “Joe Biden can save restaurants with the stroke of a pen. Here’s how.” Intrigued, I read. I’ll save you the trouble. Their proposal is that Joe Biden lift the tariff on European wines and foods. My offhand guess is that if I checked out the menus of the first 100 restaurants I encountered fewer than 10% offer European wines and foods. For every Chez Panisse there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Pizza Huts to mention Yellow Roses:
and
East of Edenses:
I suspect their proposal would do little to “save restaurants” although it might actually help their own establishments.
All of that having been said, I agree with the material of their suggestion. Those tariffs should be lifted. They were imposed because of the competition that EU- and nationally-subsidized Airbus gives to Boeing. In my view most of Boeing’s problems are self-inflict, many of them a consequence of offshoring their software development. I don’t believe that we should be in the business of indemnifying companies against the adverse consequences of their own folly. I think that Boeing should be able to design and produce its aircraft anywhere it chooses to but I also think that offshoring production, whether of software or hardware should render Boeing ineligible to bid on government contracts and Boeing should factor that into their planning. Clearly, we need to protect Boeing from itself and they need incentives.
But this all touches on a larger issue. There’s something I don’t think we’ve come to terms with yet. The post-pandemic economy is going to be very different from the economy of 2019. Restaurants and hospitality will never recover, at least not in the forms they took in 2019. It will take decades for air travel, indeed, the whole travel sector to recover.
We should seize this opportunity to rebuild the economy in direction more benign to more Americans. I doubt we will but we should.
I can’t imagine what an economy “more benign to more Americans” would be. I hope you don’t mean socialism. All forms of socialism are authoritarian, and some are totalitarian tyrannies.
As to recovery, I doubt it will happen. In fact, I expect the economy under Biden to get substantially worse, entering a major, long-term recession. First, he will encourage governors and mayors to continue the lockdowns, and he might even find a way to impose them by Presidential order. Biden’s lockdowns will not end until essentially all of us are inoculated against COVID-19. Of course, by then a mutated version will have appeared, resistant to the vaccines, and a new round of lockdowns will be imposed.
Second, the Green New Deal promoted by the extreme left wing of the Democrat Party, and endorsed by Biden and Harris, would shut down much of the economy, especially transportation and manufacturing, permanently. It is, in fact, the old radical environmentalist dream of eliminating both industry and agricultural, and of reducing the human population to a few million hunter-gatherers world-wide.
Third, the woke lunatics of the BLM/ANTIFA mobs, actively abetted by so many elected officials, will further suppress all sorts of activities and make large areas of many cities uninhabitable. Chicago’s Magnificent Mile will be a ghost town, like downtown Portland or Minneapolis.
Actually, I meant less socialism. What we have now is socialism for the rich, capitalism for most of the population.
I think people miss going out to eat as it is convenient and serves a social function for a lot of people. It will mostly be the same with the caveat that ordering out has gotten easier so that will probably take a bit higher percentage of restaurant work.
Otherwise Bob is right. I just contributed a couple of grand towards the Democrats “Lets destroy the economy fund”.
Steve
I want to comment that the issues on the Boeing 737 Max were not software bugs or outsourced software.
The software did exactly what it was design to do. The problem was the design of the MCAS system was negligent and the system created unintended results. And the MCAS system was designed in this country.
I note it because a lot of things blamed on buggy software are actually system design issues.
I beg your pardon, sir. East of Edens offers plenty of European foods:
gyros plates, Polish dogs, Italian beef and sausage to name a few.
And word has it that frequent diners can steal off into the back for an arranged kitchen seating serving Chateaux Margaux.
Can you imaging the positive economic impact to the fine dining establishments in Berwyn?
Despite the drastic changes in demographics in Berwyn and nearby Cicero over the last 30 or so years, there are still some very decent Bohemian restaurants there. Klas’s, for example, is still in operation. It’s nearing the century mark.
My dad used to say that all restaurants were Greek restaurant—most of them just didn’t serve Greek food. That was largely correct when he was alive. I think that the diversity in the menus of ordinary Chicago joints like East of Edens (both the original and the one up the block) reflects Chicago’s ethnic diversity. That’s good. Recently I have seen some soul food menu items and Mexican food menu items creeping onto their menus and I expect that process to continue. I won’t be surprised if we start seeing samosas, pakora, and other South Asian street food starting to show up on those menus. That will be good, too.