11-21-25 America's Truckin' Network

This year's domestic travel forecast includes an additional one point six million travelers compared to last Thanksgiving. That's up two percent, So apparently the economy isn't doing as rotten as the spoon federcgurgitators and mainstream media would like us to believe. Setting a new overall record, Thanksgiving is the single biggest holiday for travel compared to other others like Memorial Day

or July fourth. According to Stacy Barber, vice president of Triple A Travel, Thanksgiving travel numbers are always impressive because this holiday has become synonymous with heading out of town to spend time with loved ones. People are willing to brave the crowds and make last minute adjustments to their plans to make lifelong memories, whether it's visiting extended family or meeting up with friends.

then she texts her mom, sorry, flight delayed? Can you set aside a plate for me?

my family members. I just am so irritated if I find out that they voted for Trump and so on. What You're the one with the problem, not the other family members. Most people don't live in this bubble of irritation they deal with. You don't see us on the conservative side saying during the Biden administration and during the Obama administration that anybody that voted for them, I'm not going to associate with them and so on. It's just, you know, let it go for a twenty four hour

period of time, spend time. These are the people that are relatives, they're supposed to be your family. Let it go for a couple and you know, all these this bickering and stuff that you hear that people talk about over Thanksgiving is just absolutely ridiculous. It just basically shows sometimes the immaturity level of certain people, and the people that participate in that or the people that started those are the people with the problem. Thanksgiving Travelers by mode

of transportation by car. TRIPAA projection at least seventy three million people will travel by car. That's nearly nine twenty percent of the Thanksgiving travelers. An additional one point three million people on the road compared to last year. Now again that's up two percent. Again, overall travel is up, a number of people traveling is up two percent, and buy car is going to be up by two percent.

A warning to all you four wheelers out there that are going to be on the highway, remember that when you're out driving and you see eighteen wheelers out on the road as you are traveling between November twenty fifth and December the first when you see these trucks out on the road and if they're passing somebody, you know, if they're passing another truck and it takes maybe a mile or so before you can get around them. Have some patients realize the fact that you're out having fun, You're on.

there for Cyber Monday, that Monday after Thanksgiving. So realize that they are not home with their families, they are not enjoying the Thanksgiving holidays because they're out on the road making your Thanksgiving and your holiday possible.

than what's on the shelf. The sheets, the medicine, the stuff that's all at the hospital are there are brought by a truck. When you look at the supplies, the cleaning supplies and stuff, the janitorial stuff for office buildings, for that kind of stuff that's not on the retail shelves, but that has been brought to the location or to the warehouse the wholesaler buy a truck. So when you add all that in, there is a ton of stuff mop more than tons and tons of stuff that has

brought to you by a truck. So have a little bit of respect. Realize that a truck has a longer stopping capability or capacity than what you have. You can on in a car can pretty much stop on a drunk dime. A truck hauling a large load takes a long period of time for them to stop. And if you notice out on the highways that you're in traffic and things are slowed down, there's generally a lot of space between the truck and the car in front of them,

and people have a tendency of cutting in there. I'm kind of a mixed on this because if you're at a slow speed, that's not a big deal. But if you're on the highway and you're traveling at sixty miles an hour and there's not much room between the truck and you're trying to cut in between them, you're asking for trouble because if something slows down, the truck is not going to have enough space to stop.

and get there safely. You don't want that as part of the people thinking about Thanksgiving for the rest of their lives. Oh that's the week that so and so died because they were out on the highway. Airfare they're talking about six million people will be traveling.

can do your boarding pass ahead of time. You can actually print that out at home and hopefully it will work there at the airport. But then, of course, the flight time, depending upon where you're going. Flight times to Chicago, I think from Cincinnati is something like an hour and fifteen minutes. Down in Nashville's about an hour, So you got to figure the in your factor in the flight time.

Then once you get to the airport, getting your bags, getting off the plane, finding an uber or getting to where you've got your car rental, and then getting in the car, and then the travel time from the airport to your actual destination.

People are struggling to find new opportunities amid a week hiring. Again, we're still in that phase of no hire, no fire situation, so people aren't getting fired at a regular basis, and they're not hiring employees again because Lion Jerry Powell and the Federal Reserve are not really lowering interest rates and it's cost too much to expand businesses, and people are in a wait and see situation to see how things are going to be going. As far as you know,

any type of expansion. The sales numbers are good, the traffic flow is good, all the other economic numbers are good. It's just this wait and see situation and businesses wanting to expand and wanting to get their business stronger. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped eight thousand to a seasonally adjusted two hundred and twenty thousand for the week

ended November fifteenth, Labor Department set on Thursday. The Labor Department resumed publishing the weekly claims reporting following the end of the forty three day record setting government shutdown. Economists polled by Reuters had forecasts that the unemployment rate would be two hundred and thirty thousand, so they missed that

by about ten thousand. And you know, every time I hear the phrase economists always reminds me an economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

that until next month. Let's see the longest let me see where.

The unemployed a rate for October will.

said it may have been four point four. But you know, you look at the weekly jobless rate and the weekly job weekly jobless claims have not gone up considerably. They have actually willed this past week actually fell So if you're not having large swaths of unemployment on a weekly basis, chances are you're not going to have a large unemployment number over a period of time or for that particular month. There have been no large scale layoffs, especially reflected in there.

And remember the story we were talking about the other day, and there was a key paragraph in there. They said, when you look at some of these reports from so called experts, they are not shown over the years to be very reliable. Concentrate on the current month, current data available,

and that will be a better gauge. And again, if you look at the unemployment of the initial jobless claims, which have been between two hundred and ten thousand and up to two hundred and fifty thousand over a couple of years now actually the last year and a half thereabouts,

at two hundred and twenty thousand. We are right smack dab in the middle of that good range there, two hundred and ten actually to the lower end two hundred ten to two hundred and fifty thousand, so where people are thinking, oh, well, you know, we will never know

what the unemployment rate for October was. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits after an initial a week of aid by a proxy for hiring increase twenty eight thousand to a seasonally adjusted one point nine seven four million during the week, again not up very high. What will matter then is the labor participation rate. How many people have dropped out of the market. There are some people people in middle aged that may be retiring, so they

are not part of the unemployment figures. Other people that just stop looking for whatever reason. I don't know what they're living off of. But again, it's a situation where you're not seeing these major fluctuations, so you shouldn't expect to see that unemployment go up very substantially, and so this handwringing that we won't know what that number is for October is kind of ridiculous. October existing home sales see a small gain, but supply is dropping that's kind

of interesting. Improving mortgage rates at the end of the summer boosted home sales, but that gain, like may be short lived. Sales of previous previously owned homes in October rose one point two percent from September to four point one million units on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis.

itself during the Great Recession until about twenty twelve. But this is a correction, as they've been talking about, a return to normalization. Because when you're in these hot markets like Orlando, Tampa, a lot of cities in the South and in some of the more resort areas, that's where a lot of people flock to during the pandemic. Because

if they were working from home again, still getting a paycheck. Basically, if you're allowed to work from home and you're not going to be called back in the office, you can work from anywhere. And so people were choosing to move and to buy homes in these areas, which when you flock to a particular area, when a lot of people go in, the demand goes up and the supply may not be there, so that would increase those home prices.

And so now what we're seeing is kind of a leveling off of that and kind of pulling back down. But the number of people in that report that they talked what we talked about yesterday and covered very well on this program, I might add, is the fact that very few people are actually underwater, that their home is

now value less than what their mortgage was is. And that's one of the problems we saw during the Great Recession, where home values in some areas, even in my area in northern Kentucky actually dropped, of course the board about forty percent. So people that had bought homes within the last for the couple of years before that actually found

themselves underwater. Fortunately, the banks looked at that and said, well, you know, normally what we'd have to do is we'd have to ask for more equity or pay more down and people would not be able to stay in that house. But so many people were in that situation, so I think they well pretty much at the time, they did it on a case by case basis. If people were making their mortgages, they weren't likely to ask for more money, realizing that the thing would eventually turn around and the

values would come back. So again, there's very few homes at this point in time that are underwater, and so people you know, just you know. And in that report also yesterday, we talked about that from the last time, on average, the number when homes were previously sold to today are up about sixty seven percent. So what they pointed out is that if the prices came down two three four percent, you're still way ahead. If your home value went up sixty seven percent over that period of time.

Talk a little bit more about this story October. Existing home sales will see a small gain, but the supply is dropping. I'm Kevin Gordon. America's truck neckwork seven hundred WLW.

Additional heavy rainfall and a thread of flash flooding will be seen for southern California, western Arizona, and southern Nevada, along the Gulf Coast, across the over Mississippi Valley and into the southeast. Record warm temperatures continuing.

and how it's calculated and so on. During that contract signing period the average rate on a thirty year fixed mortgage came down a little bit, but then moved up again. The popular thirty thirty year rate started August at six point sixty three percent, fell steadily to six point one three percent, so a half a percent dropped by mid September, and then came back up to six point three seven by the end of the month. According to Mortgage News Daily,

it now stands at three point three six percent. Now, we've talked about on this program the difference in terms of a home price if you had a back before the pandemic, if you had an interest rate below three percent, what your rate on that would be, what your monthly payment would be, how much home you could afford that is changed dramatically by a difference between three percent and six percent. We've had those numbers on this program. I'll probably bring that up in the next couple of weeks

again just to remind you. But it is a drastic amount. And so you know, somebody that's earning a certain level of money that based on the house that they could they can buy based on these current interest rates, is far less than what they could possibly afford. Now, just I'm just going to off the top of my head, I think the number was, if you were a right one hundred and ten thousand dollars earning one hundred and

ten thousand dollars. Based on this statistic that they were talking about, you could afford a house somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred and some thousand dollars. If the interest rate was down around three percent, you could afford a house one hundred and sixty seven thousand dollars more.

One hundred and sixty seven thousand more. Plus if you look at the interest rate on that home of the average home being sold is around three hundred and fifty They say that the low end is three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand, so you pick three hundred and fifty thousand.

affordability isn't there. We can't jump in. All you gotta do is point to lieon Jerry Powell and the interest rates that people are paying on mortgages, because when you're down up there in the six percent range as opposed to even a five percent, four percent thereabout, the numbers are asked are just phenomenal. And you can go to these mortgage calculators, you can go online. There are different plates. I think bank rate does one, and some of these

other investing tools. You can just go in into a mortgage calculator and plug in different income levels, how much percentage down, how much house you can afford, and that, so you can do that numbers yourself. But it is it is astonishing. I was shocked when I saw it. Let's see the inventory for homesale for homes for sale has also come down after gaining for much of the year's supply fell one point five to two million units, down point seven percent from September, although still nearly eleven

percent higher than the year ago. At the current sales pace, there would be four point four month supplies still on the market, which probably isn't too bad. That's why sale prices are still gaining. Medium price on a home sold in October was four hundred and fifteen two hundred dollars, an increase of two point one from October of twenty twenty four and the twenty eighth consecutive month of annual gains.

Daniel Danielle Hale, chief economists at realtor dot com looking ahead, Home shoppers in today's market face some advantages from following mortgage rates and seasonally slower competition. At the same time, the lack of housing affordability continues to be a challenge keeping home sales at their historically low levels. Homes are staying on the market longer, at an average of thirty

four days last month compared with twenty nine days in October. Now, that is not such a bad thing from a buyer's standpoint, obviously, from a seller standpoint, and in a case where you have a seller where you see so many times that they will actually find a home that they want to buy and they'll go ahead and did on that, or actually buy the house if they can afford it, and they still have to sell their house now if they can't put that in as a contingency that I have

to sell my home first before this loan closes. If the seller isn't interested in that, then they could be possibly stuck with two mortgages. But from a buyer's standpoint, when you get into and I don't know if you watch any of these shows, but there's all these different I think it's on HGTV and some of these other shows, million dollar listings and there's a Beachfront, bargain Hunt and

these type of things. When they start talking about a tight market, people, you know, the realtor is saying, well, you know, these homes down here are moving really quick. You can't wait, you can't hold back and make a decision. So when somebody is looking at a home, that's when they go in and they buy something in a hurry because they're afraid of losing that home to another person that comes in and puts in a bid on it.

That's bad from the seller stand or from the buyer's standpoint, because if there's a large competition for there, you may be hurrying into a decision that may not be right for you. And if you're paying more for that house, obviously your mortgage is going to go up. So being in a situation where homes are on the market for about a month at least gives you a time to look at that, look at a couple of other properties, make the determination which suits better, which better is suited

for your family. So now again from a seller standpoint, that's not so good. So you know, in any type of a situation, you know, if you're a buyer or a seller, it depends on the market. If supply is low and you're a buyer, then price is going to be higher than what you expect. But if the demand is low, then the supply is higher and those prices will come down and fluctuate. So it depends on what

side of the transaction you're on. First time home buyers made a comeback in the market, representing thirty two percent of sales, up from twenty seven percent a year ago, but not all regions aren't equal, and of course we see that across the board. Lawrence Yun, a chief economist for the Realtors, first time home buyers are facing headwinds in the Northeast due to lack of supply, in the West because of high home prices, and so again, you know,

it depends on where you live. Sales growth continues to be strongest in the high end of the market. Homes priced above one million dollars saw sales up by more than sixteen percent from a year ago. Those price between seven hundred and fifty and one million saw a gain of ten percent. Meanwhile, sales of homes priced between one hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand were up just one percent, and homes below one hundred thousand saw

a drop in sales actually of nearly three percent. So interesting news there from the Home National Association of Realtors and realtor dot com in the various people that put into this particular report. There's been there's a lot of bills now that Congress is back in session. There's a whole legislative agenda. The Hill Transportation leaders I the Highway bill that needs to be passed, and we'll get into that coming up, because there's a lot of stuff that

needs to be done. There's a lot of stuff that's been sitting out there for a long period of time that needs to be corrected and needs to be enforced, and they need to get off their butts and pass it. We'll be talking about that coming up. I'm Kevin Gordon, America's truck and Network seven hundred WLW.

on those? Why weren't they meeting in sessions. Why weren't they breaking up in the individual groups trying to get some consensus on some of this stuff.

stresses a highway bill that addresses autonomous technology. Again, with the movement towards autonomous cars, autonomous trucks, even autonomous planes, for God's sake, the legislation that needs to be put in a place to kind of catch up with that technology and regulate that technology is something that shouldn't be played with and should be dealt with considerably. The House Transportation Appropriations Bill would also try to provide two hundred

million dollars for truck parking expansion projects. Two hundred million. There's far more of a need than that than anything else. And the thing that I keep bringing up is the fact that you know, back in the day, let's not forget in nineteen fifty six when Dwight Eisenhower put forth the Highway trans basically the Highway Bill. At that point in time, this was based. Okay, let's give you a

little bit of history lesson here. Dwight Eisenhower was the Commander in Chief or the Allied commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War Two. Okay, he saw in Germany how the Audubon worked, how the German troops were able to go across this basically what they called the Audubon, but which is basically a freeway from one end of the country to the other in a matter

of hours and in terms of days. Going back in Dwight Eisenhower's history, back when he was a lieutenant colonel, I believe, back after World War One, back in nineteen twenty twenty one, just to test to see, because that was when transportation was coming into full force with cars, automobiles, trucks, and so on. They wanted to see how long it would take for a convoy to get from Washington, d c. All the way to the other side of the country and over that because there were no roads, there were

dirt roads, gravel roads, all kinds of horrible conditions. It took them, I believe, if memory serves me correct, almost a month to get there. A month to get from one end of the country to the other. When he became president, recognizing the need during the Cold War to be able to move troops from one end of the country to the other, he developed this nineteen fifty six

National Highway Transportation and Defense Defense Highway Act. So as part of the defense budget, ninety percent of what was spent or what was the cost of building the interstate highway system, ninety percent of that was paid for by the federal government recognizing the need of this for defense purposes. Now, of course, they didn't want to freak everybody out and said, well, you know, we've got to be able to move troops because we're going to go to war with with you know,

with Russia, the uss R and all this sort of stuff. No, they said, you know, they passed it off as a highway transportation. But the byproduct of that is is the fact that we're able to as tourists, as going on vacation, able to travel to distant places over a matter of a couple of days instead of taking the entire week to get there, spend a week and then or spend

a couple of days and then come back. So, plus the fact that's the result of that, we now have you know, fresh seafood into the middle of the country. We have citrus coming up from Florida and from other places that don't rot on the way. And so the benefits of this, and the government saw this as you know, a necessity, and so as a part of that, they paid ninety percent of that. Now, why the Transportation Highway Act and some of the Infrastructure Bill isn't part of

the defense budget so to speak. Why that hasn't been kept in the place is beyond beyond my comprehension. Because it is still a vital importance to the movement of troops, and so if it is still important for troops, then some of the money out of that should come into the infrastructure for that. So again giving me a little bit of a history lesson there, But the Transportation Infrastructure Committee, and when they're talking about two hundred million dollars for rest areas, that's.

the transportation budget. Nothing flat in terms of trying to build and to expand these different rest areas.

to the radio. And so rather than doing the quick fix and it was a very cheap fix that could be done and can do that, rather than doing it, just started eliminating it out of the cars, and a bill before Congress, and this has been there for a couple of years now AM radio for every car. New nationwide study Critical Mass Insights showed overwhelming consumer support for keeping AMFM radio built into vehicles, reinforcing radio's continued role

as a core in car feature. The research finds that ninety six percent of Americans consider AMFM access important when purchasing a new car, while ninety eight percent says it's important that the radio be easy to locate on a

vehicle's dashboard for infertainment system. Now, during times of emergency, when the electric goes down, one of the best way of transporting or transmitting the actual emergency alerts and so on is by is via AM radio, and so if that's not available, then critical information having to do with emergencies is not going to be transmitted, and so the importance of having this in vehicles is extremely important. Findings cut across all demographics, with adults eighteen to seventy four

broadly agreeing on radio's relevance. Even among those who don't regularly listen to amr FM, roughly nine and ten say radio access is crucial in situations where they may need it the most. That includes severe weather, natural disasters, major emergencies, or man made tragedies scenarios where ninety seven percent say having live local radio available is vital.

or Congressional switchboard, and they're very friendly. It's not going to put you on anybody's radar screen. They're not going to be haranguing you for you know, talking to the government or something along those lines. You can leave a message for your senator or congressman and it's very easy.

the AM rate radio for every car. That's basically the terminology for those bill and the phone number is two zero two two two four three one two one. Again, that's two zero two two two four three one two one. Let them know what you think about this, tell them that you find it important that radios stay in cars and that it be mandated and that it is available again because of national emergencies or not. The House again, the House bill is nine seventy nine and the Senate

bill is three fifteen. So just call that number. They're very friendly. It's perhaps actually I've used it several times and quite honestly, it's one of the few things that's enjoyable and when dealing with the federal government, they're very polite, very friendly, and it'll get your message into the mailbox or the voicemail of your particular congressman or senators.