Here’s a list of the largest U. S. ports and who owns them:
| Port | Volume (MM TEU) | Owned By |
| Los Angeles | 9.2 | Los Angeles |
| Long Beach | 8.1 | Long Beach |
| New York & New Jersey | 7.5 | PANY&NJ |
| Savannah | 4.6 | Georgia Ports Authority |
| Northwest Seaport Alliance | 3.3 | Seattle and Tacoma |
| Houston | 2.9 | Houston |
| Virginia | 2.8 | Virginia |
| Oakland | 2.4 | Oakland |
| South Carolina | 2.3 | South Carolina |
| Miami | 1.0 | Miami |
In general these ports are public-private hybrids not unlike airports with private companies leasing facilities from authorities owned by the state of municipality in which they reside. As rule their executive directors earn comfortable but not exorbitant salaries. The situation is somewhat different from some of the people who work for the port authorities. Notoriously, a police officer working for the PANYNJ takes home almost twice what its executive director does.
As should be obvious they conform to the “long tail” rule.
The earnings of these port authorities are considerable but again not excessive particularly when you consider the tremendous volume goods moving through them. Although they all run in the black net operating revenues are modest for organizations of their size and in general by law these are spent on “capital improvements”.
All this by way of saying that subsidizing these ports to maintain excess capacity would be considerably more difficult than meets the eye. I don’t know much about the local politics in any of these places but if they were in Illinois it would be next to impossible—anything you gave them would be absorbed in payrolls or pensions. That they do not have excess capacity has little or nothing to do with the workings of capitalism.
I thought this article from The Hill made a great, ports are only a manifestation of supply chain issues all over the economy.
What we are seeing is a hose with too much water pressure in it and it sprung a leak. Just fixing the leak (like relieving congestions at a couple of ports) is likely to create a leak somewhere else. The true solution is to reduce the water pressure (i.e. align demand with supply).
I can only think of one solution to reduce the pressure everywhere in the system, but its a doozy (induce a recession).
As to the cause; I imagine its multi-factorial. Monetary policy (as an investment advisor mentioned, supply shortages and inflation are a typical result of excessively loose monetary policy); destruction of productive capacity (COVID is probably a main culprit); higher demand from inefficient use of resources (I imagine having offices open but 80% of staff WFH means a lot of upkeep for “offices” is wasted).
Producing more in the U. S., Canada, or Mexico would help, too.
Another factor is consolidation which has tended to cause us to import more from China.
As people other than I have been pointing out lately JIT is great until it isn’t.
Agreed producing more here would help, but even the continental logistics network (trains, freight) is overstressed.
The other point is something I was taught in economics — excluding foreign trade; the amount to invest in additional production capacity is what remains after production capacity less consumption. If consumption is too high, there is nothing left to invest in additional capacity.