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Drilling Deep: What truck drivers are going to report to the IRS this year

Todd Amen, the president of ATBS, sees lots of truckers’ tax returns. It’s one of the things his company does among the services it provides to truckers.

On this week’s Drilling Deep podcast, Todd sat in with host John Kingston to discuss some of the numbers he’s seen so far. It’s reasonable to assume that driver incomes went down in 2019 compared to 2018. But how much did they fall? Todd discusses the type of year drivers had last year.

Also on this week’s podcast, John talks about the diesel market and a new report that should make everybody who is exposed to the price of diesel – shippers and carriers – very happy. The report sees lots of diesel sloshing around in the world, especially in Asia, and the report sees little chance of a significant uptick in diesel prices, even after the coronavirus spread is brought to a halt.

Drilling Deep is one of the family of FreightWaves’ FreightCasts podcasts.


One Comment

  1. Noble1 suggests SMART truck drivers should UNITE & collectively cut out the middlemen from picking truck driver pockets ! UNITE , CONQUER , & PROSPER ! IMHO

    Fast forward the podcast to 19:10

    Listen carefully to what he’s saying starting from “so today”

    What he’s saying is that being an O/O today is more beneficial to be contracted(leased on) to a “carrier” .

    Herein lies the problem . O/O’s need to wake up , UNITE and cut out the middleman and collectively become the carrier/freight broker . In this way not only will you gain market share directly for yourselves and increase your profits while cutting your costs , but you’ll also be set up in a way that you won’t fear laws like AB5 . You haul for YOUR carrier !

    By leasing on to a carrier you’re already uniting indirectly , although you’re giving up a tremendous amount of profit under the control of the carrier . You’re not truly “independent” , you’re a “dependant contractor” under the “mirage and illusion” of being independent due to owning your truck .

    Restructure yourselves collectively and obtain a bigger piece of the pie by eliminating the middleman that you’re currently dependant upon .

    Learn from what this guy is saying in the podcast . He’s indirectly telling you that it pays more to be “UNITED” especially in current times due to contracted freight based on VOLUME !

    United you have more capacity to offer due to your volume !

    IMHO ……

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.