You are dramatically overestimating the amount of food shortage there will be. It will be bad, but nowhere near "we can only feed 10% of people" bad. The US produces far more food than it needed to feed everyone that lives in it
It's not the
amount of food that's concerning to me (I'm aware the US is a net exporter of food) - its the shipment and distribution. OTL, we had short term shortages of quite a lot of things with only Covid as a problem, and in this scenario we have Covid rearing its ugly head (likely as a complete surprise rather than as the anticipated
oh shit OTL)
on top of the problems and panic from the time shift. (The News may well be focused on the problems from the ISoT to the exclusion of enough other things that whatever-Covid-19-ends-up-called becomes a serious problem before anyone's really aware of it...where OTL, anyone paying attention knew it was coming for
months before there were significant US effects.) Local stabilities won't be enough to handle that - there would need to be a national stability to ensure that the food traveled the distance it needed to. To the best of my knowledge, large cities do
not produce enough food locally to feed the citizenry, and if food isn't shipped in...well, there's enough food in the country, but you've
still got a food shortage. Multiply that by every large city affected and that could easily be a
lot of problem.
How would Trump's impeachment hearing go? It was an ongoing process at the time but I can see it going one of two ways:
- The Democrats drop it entirely in the face of the crisis. Frankly, this is the more likely. They just drop it after impeaching him in the house as the "fuck you" it is and focusing on the crisis. The public wouldn't be able to stand watching lawmakers do
- The GOP essentially capitulates and votes trump out. They are fully cognizant (IRL) of how bad he is. I can certainly see them just deciding to stick with Pence and having a reliable head in the middle of a huge crisis.
Hm. As of December 18th 2019, the articles of impeachment were in, so technically it would be supposed to go to the Senate. I would add a third possibility to your list: people are sufficiently freaked over what's happening that the impeachment is effectively forgotten. With both parties more concerned about the new problems from the ISoT it becomes a "we'll deal with it when we have time" sort of thing. Of course, if Trump does something sufficiently boneheaded, obstructive, or vile, Democrats (being politicians, of course) could well bring it up again as a lever against Trump and his supporters. Both Republicans and Democrats are
politicians first - so if there's any stability or chance of elections, they're both quite likely to be more focused on their re-elections than the problems the country is facing.
Soo... thinking about it, the impeachment hearing simply falls out of view as not being important enough. Time passes - maybe weeks, maybe months - before Trump pulls something big enough and nasty enough to pull attention back away from the country's crises, Democrats push for the impeachment to happen, and we end up with something roughly approximating the OTL circus. Democrats hate him and want him gone - there will be no movement to acquit from that quarter; depending on what he did to draw attention to himself, there could be even more antipathy than OTL. Republicans have bent knee to his lies and obstruction and bile for over three years, so just as in OTL they continue to excuse and justify his every action. Maybe
all Republicans (instead of merely
almost all) vote to acquit "as a show of solidarity in these unprecedented times", or conversely maybe there are a handful of Republicans who decide they want someone in office who isn't...well...Trump. Either way, the 2/3 threshold for impeachment isn't reached, and division and distrust continue to grow when they can least be afforded. Democrats are furious that an incompetent like Trump is being allowed to cause problems when the country is in such a major and unprecedented crisis, while Republicans shout that Democratic willingness to impeach the president in the middle of such a crisis is treasonous. Non-political-persons who are mostly just worried about how they're going to
survive in this new world watch in horror as the country continues to tear itself apart.
The flip side of that is the nightmare scenario would be the United States goes fascist and secures a food supply by basically implementing Generalplan Ost on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. A country with a deficit of food and a surplus of weapons is a situation that might get very ugly very quickly.
This would require the nation to actually hold together enough for there to be a nation to do this. If things fall apart to the extent of "use weapons to get food", I would expect it to more be a matter of smaller regions who have managed to pull together and refugees and violent (desparate) gangs. If Mexico has managed to pull
itself together, it may be able to resist these smaller actors, though it's also possible that significant damage is caused. Worst case, armed brigands and refugees added to Mexico's internal problems from the ISoT overwhelm Mexico's ability to adapt, and Mexico collapses right along with the United States.
But anyways on the manufacturing front NA is fine. Lifestyles pre-transference are torpedoed but what can you do.
Fite me. I'll go dig up my undergrad papers on the topic if need be.
Would be interested to see some information on this, actually - almost everything I can find is in terms of imports versus exports rather than any information on actual production. I've found some bits and pieces where claims are made that most electronics and televisions (for instance) are almost exclusively imported rather than produced locally, but outside of that it's mostly anecdotal. Some information on how we import
so very much in the way of consumer goods, but no information on how much if any is actually produced locally, or how much is produced from locally mined materials, etc. Looking specifically at Wally World, the numbers I can find vary
wildly and nothing looks authoritative - Wally World is stated to rely on imports for from anywhere from 25% to 80% of its consumer goods sales (not authoritative and such agreement among figures. sigh.) At 25% that's significant shortages and the problems caused by that. At 80%, the problem becomes rather more than "significant". To make things worse, it's likely that the shortages are category-specific; it's unlikely that X% of
everything is made in the US - more likely that >X% of Product A is made in the US, while <X% of Product B is. See earlier comment on electronics/TVs, and also according to Business Insider, 97% of clothes sold in the US in 2015 were imported...
See I'm not sure about that. A lot of demand will dry up overnight and without warning. I've been working under the assumption that NA is headed towards massive recession a lot of consumer demand might just up and disappear and the US certainly isn't going to need to build new fighter jets anytime soon. It might actually be enough without expansion at all.
Agree on the massive recession. From what's been said in the thread so far, it sounds like every single port in the ISoT has just been destroyed. All of the jobs (and supplies) from shipping are gone along with all the ships and ports. With no capability to export, every industry that is relying on exports for survival crashes - unless we can find a use for all those not-going-to-China soybeans, for instance, there's going to be some unhappy US farmers out of a job. The fishing fleets along the coasts are gone - their ports are destroyed, their boats are destroyed, and any who were at sea during the ISoT are probably dead. With the continental shelf largely being moved, all that high value seaside property isn't so high value anymore - a view over a muck-filled wasteland isn't likely to be terribly popular. Hopefully the continental shelf coming along for the ride will prevent any immediate massive earthquakes from destroying the coasts, because that is
just what the situation needs added to it.
Consumer demand might plummet from all the people losing their jobs, but at the same time prices for consumer goods are likely to
skyrocket. All the cheap goods from China-or-wherever are gone, and not coming back - that will drastically cut supply and lead to price hikes and price gouging. Raw materials imported for use in production are likewise gone, causing massive job losses in at least the short term - until such time as supplies can be found more locally, or until productive colonies can be started.
