The Trump Presidency, Season 2

Noodles

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Bartholomew Gallacher

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Trump's an idiot and all Americans will suffer, episode whatever: Trump's administation introduced tarriffs on Canadian wood.

The narrative behind others tarriffs is that Trump wants to bring back the jobs and plants, but with wood that's impossible. So a possibility is that Canada might be flooding the American market with dumping prices, and therefore Trump wants to protect the American wood production.

It turns out this is wrong. The USA are producing more wood than Canada, but Canada is exporting more of it due to having only 10% of the US's population. And the main market is America.

Taxing Canadian wood therefore might mean that building new homes in America gets much, much expensive for a certain amount of time, fueling the housing crisis, because America has not the industrial capacity to meet the current demant.

 

detrius

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Trump's an idiot and all Americans will suffer, episode whatever: Trump's administation introduced tarriffs on Canadian wood.

The narrative behind others tarriffs is that Trump wants to bring back the jobs and plants, but with wood that's impossible. So a possibility is that Canada might be flooding the American market with dumping prices, and therefore Trump wants to protect the American wood production.

It turns out this is wrong. The USA are producing more wood than Canada, but Canada is exporting more of it due to having only 10% of the US's population. And the main market is America.

Taxing Canadian wood therefore might mean that building new homes in America gets much, much expensive for a certain amount of time, fueling the housing crisis, because America has not the industrial capacity to meet the current demant.

Well, you already know what they're going to do: delist national parks and engage in massive deforestation
 

Noodles

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Noodles

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Innula Zenovka

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Trump's an idiot and all Americans will suffer, episode whatever: Trump's administation introduced tarriffs on Canadian wood.

The narrative behind others tarriffs is that Trump wants to bring back the jobs and plants, but with wood that's impossible. So a possibility is that Canada might be flooding the American market with dumping prices, and therefore Trump wants to protect the American wood production.

It turns out this is wrong. The USA are producing more wood than Canada, but Canada is exporting more of it due to having only 10% of the US's population. And the main market is America.

Taxing Canadian wood therefore might mean that building new homes in America gets much, much expensive for a certain amount of time, fueling the housing crisis, because America has not the industrial capacity to meet the current demant.

It would be easy enough to tell if Canada is dumping wood on the US market at artificially deflated prices , because in order for that to happen the Canadian government would have to be subsidising either timber production in general or exports to the US in particular.

If that's not the case, and it's simply the case that Canadian producers, for reasons of geography and climate, better able to supply the US building market than are domestic US producers, the solution would seem to be not to create artificial barriers to imports from Canada in the hope that US growers will be better able to compete with them but for US investors to put their money not into increasing US timber production but into providing goods and services to Canada, at a price and quality Canadians are willing to pay, on which Canadians can spend some of the US$ they receive from US timber buyers.

This whole tariffs business is simply a way of dressing up what are, in effect, new federal sales taxes, paid by US importers and passed on, in whole or in part, to US consumers. This will go some way towards funding Trump's planned tax cuts for the rich.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Casey Pelous

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As someone who has spent a few decades up here in timber country, I think I can shed a little light.

We cut all the easily accessible big -- "old growth" -- timber a long time ago. We have lots and lots of smaller logs, but smaller logs require different, more expensive mill technology to process profitably. Weyerhauser and the other timber companies did not invest in the new tech for reasons. Had they made that move, it would have been in the 1980's. That's when the PNW lumber business basically died. You may have heard it blamed on the spotted owl.

Up here in the PNW, we're still very much in the timber -- "tree farming and harvesting" -- business. We're not in the lumber -- "making logs into boards" -- business. Smaller logs go to the pulp mills, the pulp goes to the paper mills. Bigger logs get loaded on ships and are sold overseas. Some of those ships are big, floating lumber mills that pick up a huge load of logs, often down in Olympia, and turn them into lumber on the way across the ocean. Said lumber goes mostly to China and Japan.

IQ47's harebrained scheme seems to be that charging tariffs on lumber from Canada will somehow make Weyerhauser build a bunch of lumber mills here and get back into the lumber business, employing good 'muricans in the process and we'll be back to the alleged good ol' days. Why those 'muricans would want to come back to what was miserable, hard, dangerous work now that they have found better employment is just one puzzle around this plan.

Little hint: those ship/lumber mills are highly, highly automated. So is the harvesting. "Lumberjacks" are about as scarce as deep tunnel coal miners these days. It's a heavy equipment job now -- nobody's "swinging from tree to tree with their best gal by their side." They're driving a huge tractor with a terrifying rotary saw on an articulated hydraulic arm and mowing down multiple acres per hour.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Little hint: those ship/lumber mills are highly, highly automated. So is the harvesting. "Lumberjacks" are about as scarce as deep tunnel coal miners these days. It's a heavy equipment job now -- nobody's "swinging from tree to tree with their best gal by their side." They're driving a huge tractor with a terrifying rotary saw on an articulated hydraulic arm and mowing down multiple acres per hour.
 

detrius

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IQ47's harebrained scheme seems to be that charging tariffs on lumber from Canada will somehow make Weyerhauser build a bunch of lumber mills here and get back into the lumber business, employing good 'muricans in the process and we'll be back to the alleged good ol' days. Why those 'muricans would want to come back to what was miserable, hard, dangerous work now that they have found better employment is just one puzzle around this plan.

Little hint: those ship/lumber mills are highly, highly automated. So is the harvesting. "Lumberjacks" are about as scarce as deep tunnel coal miners these days. It's a heavy equipment job now -- nobody's "swinging from tree to tree with their best gal by their side." They're driving a huge tractor with a terrifying rotary saw on an articulated hydraulic arm and mowing down multiple acres per hour.
Mandatory YouTube link:


Wow, that was funnier when the Oval Office wasn't occupied by a bunch of transphobes.
 

Kamilah Hauptmann

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Trump's an idiot and all Americans will suffer, episode whatever: Trump's administation introduced tarriffs on Canadian wood.

The narrative behind others tarriffs is that Trump wants to bring back the jobs and plants, but with wood that's impossible. So a possibility is that Canada might be flooding the American market with dumping prices, and therefore Trump wants to protect the American wood production.

It turns out this is wrong. The USA are producing more wood than Canada, but Canada is exporting more of it due to having only 10% of the US's population. And the main market is America.

Taxing Canadian wood therefore might mean that building new homes in America gets much, much expensive for a certain amount of time, fueling the housing crisis, because America has not the industrial capacity to meet the current demant.

That was a complaint during prior disputes. The reason the dumping was the mass harvest of pine beetle threatened areas to try to slow the advance across the tundra. But environmental concern is hippie cuck stuff and government subsidy is communism. Die, boreal forest, die. Shareholder line must go up.
 

Kamilah Hauptmann

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Almost like the systems put into place were the result of centuries of experience and expertise.
 

Noodles

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Almost like the systems put into place were the result of centuries of experience and expertise.
People against laws and regulations fail to realize that, almost universally, laws and regulations exist to protect people from harm. Physical harm, monetary harm, mental harm, emotional harm, etc.

The process has a purpose and as the saying goes, it was often "written in blood."
 

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People against laws and regulations fail to realize that, almost universally, laws and regulations exist to protect people from harm.
Most people who are against laws and regulations tend to be the people breaking them.
 

CronoCloud Creeggan

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I saw that mentioned on CNN, figured the white South-African expats who deep-down miss Apartheid, got the Trumpenfuhrer's ear. The same kind of people were the ones who convinced the Reagan administration to go soft on Apartheid because the ANC were commies who would take stuff away from white people and hand South Africas resources over to the Soviet Union or something like that.
 

Myradyl Muse

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I saw that mentioned on CNN, figured the white South-African expats who deep-down miss Apartheid, got the Trumpenfuhrer's ear. The same kind of people were the ones who convinced the Reagan administration to go soft on Apartheid because the ANC were commies who would take stuff away from white people and hand South Africas resources over to the Soviet Union or something like that.
Perhaps Musk baby, aka Weird Wormtongue, dangled some slurpy whispers into his ear? ;)