Huh 30% of our lumber just got 50% more expensive. Good thing we don't have shortages of affordable housing that need new construction to solve. Brilliant stuff Donald. Truly some 4D chess moves.
indeed. i'm sure he's surrounded by some lumber moguls stateside that are going to get very rich from this. very russia coded.
i don't doubt deregulation on clearcutting as well as removing land ownership and no logging in national forests & protected lands.... are around the corner with this admin. feel like they attempted that during his last term with attempting to disgrace park rangers over wildfires and saying they didn't rake the leaves on the ground or whatever.
EDIT: Adding a TL:DR, this article explains how the Trump admin reduced the size of two national monuments by 90% and 91% respectively. This is just one example, there are more and most of them are out west in lands untouched for nearly a century. Saved for posterity because once they're gone, they're gone.
I think the clamoring of the aesthetic of impartiality is destroying interesting discussion. The president is currently lining his pockets with tax payer dollars and being an overall bumbling buffoon. It is not partisan when the would view the US as weaker, less intelligent, and less reliable. Its consequences of inaction and bad policy of the current administration
There's enough corruption and special interest dealings in politics to fill an encyclopedia. If we start on that thread, then the forum will fill up with politics.
lol calling things partisan when it shines a light on what is effectively a mob seizing control of a nation and its resources is very funny. the ted cruz playbook
You should try programming language X vs language Y, cloud vs on-prem, Framework A vs Framework B, OOP vs Composition etc., etc. HN is as partisan as it gets.
It's worse than that. He is so completely off that he thinks this means US builders will chose to buy US lumber instead and that will work out positively for everyone in the US.
He doesn't give a shit about US lumber or US builders.
If he isn't stuffing his pockets, he's leveraging the populist playbook. In this case, 'scapegoating'.
But let's be honest, he likely has a huge amount of debt. Before he came into office he almost certainly fixed the interest on that debt knowing he could blow inflation through the roof and inflate it away.
The "make more money" rationale is way too logical vs how this guy's brain operates. It's better understood as being like Pro Wrestling. Except the "ring" is the world economy.
• PHASE 1: COLLECT UNDERPANTS. (tariff "foreign" goods desired by Americans, collect upon import from companies, clarify spiked prices experienced by consumers ‘entirely’ due to prior admin policies)
• PHASE 2: … (let simmer)
• PHASE 3: PROFIT. ("return" tariff costs to companies)
If it was a coin flip, there'd be a 50% chance he did good things every day and we'd have a significantly better outcome than we do now. Its many times worse than a coin clip.
There was significant talk about market manipulation - he knows what he's going to tariff and how that'll affect the stock market, so he can buy low and sell high without any risk, because he is effectively the dominant market force right now
I don't cutting down our forests either but the stated goal of the whole exercise is to improve the US's businesses and self reliance on local industry...
Why would anyone, even one of his supporters, care about the stated goal? The man has decades of pursuing goals other than his stated goals. You'd have to be profoundly naive.
> Why would anyone, even one of hoods supporters, care about the stated goal?
Because regardless of the execution, this is a forcing function around a broader topic about prosperity in a nation. Tangentially it's also about potential future conflict with China (I hope not!). Both of which I think are much more interesting of a discussion than base partisan mud-slinging.
Indeed. Donald Trump is only the visible tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline it's a massive and all encompassing corruption, comprised of an organized multi-national cabal that touches every part of the globe and which has its roots in the world starting well before WWI. The goal of which appears has always been to enrich the people on the inside while sewing chaos. To these figures, war and peril have always been more profitable than making peace.
Price is set at the margin. If America is physically incapable of supplying 100% of its own lumber needs, then that Canadian lumber is the marginal good, and the price of 100% of lumber will go up, not just the Canadian stuff.
Two things that will prevent that:
- inertia
- it's likely that Canadian lumber before the tariffs wasn't the marginal good, wasn't the highest cost supplier. If Canadian suppliers were making 10% more profit than the previously marginal supplier, the price will go up 40% instead of 50%, Canadian suppliers absorbing that 10%.
Or they'll raise prices by that ten percent and become the marginal supplier. No way they're going to accept a loss. (Many items shipped into the USA of late have tariff related fees.)
I know you're being facetious, but his entire immigration policy is to deport a large part of the construction labor pool, so he was never had a chance to make housing more affordable.
Please be aware people reading don't know which country you are from, so using "our" is ambiguous. You could just as well have been Canadian, and it took extra deciphering to guess you're apparently from the US.
Geography as in softwood forests, instead of the iconic maple leaf. In no way Canada would be importing 30%+ of its construction timber from the US. Canada is a major softwood timber exporter.
This comment seems exactly like the school room exercise where the teacher hands out a test with a paragraph of instructions that includes the text buried in it: "do not answer any questions below" and students rush through the test and fail because they didn't bother reading the entire comment before ripping off their own because "our" is ambiguous. There is plenty of context in the comment, even for non-North Americans, since its very unlikely "Donald" was referring to famed Canadian-actor Donald Sutherland.
Or would you prefer every comment on HN to begin with: "As a/an $CountryDemonym..." or other requisite bona fides?
Trump is and always has been a one-trick-pony: Shock and awe with a ridiculously over-the-top threat to shake his opponent and anchor the discussion high, then "accept" a deal that's better than any that could have been achieved with a calm opponent (pure bullying).
His second weapon is throwing a monkey wrench into the works after agreeing to something. Keep the opponent on their back heel.
It works well, until it doesn't. Once you meet an opponent who stands firm no matter what you threaten, you lose your bargaining position. Carney is well-versed in this kind of negotiation.
Right it probably works in real estate if you aren’t dealing with the same trading partners often. It is a business where dirtbag behavior is the norm.
May also explain why he stopped doing actual NYC RE dev and moved onto his licensing model in dozens of cities (new pools of suckers).
But when every threat & walk back is covered in national media, and he is playing the same game with the same big trading partners .. it loses its effect. Similarly he’s quite old and certainly lost any touch he had.
Another prominent justification for U.S. tariffs has been their claim that, since the United States runs, quote, a 'trade deficit' with Canada, we were 'ripping them off.' Also a quote. But the U.S.’s narrow merchandise trade deficit only exists because the U.S. buys so much of its energy from Canada. Canada fuels American growth: supplying 99 per cent of their natural gas imports, 85 per cent of their electricity imports, 60 per cent of their crude oil imports. I don’t think they want us to stop sending any of that energy.
His negotiating methods, if one can call them that, are like "single use weapons" that are relationship burning rather than building. If you are doing 100s of one-off deals with counterparties you will never talk to again, and who don't know each other.. it might actually work.
But you burn the ability to make more deals with the same counterparty again.
If you played this game with your neighbor over a fenceline or tree limb dangerously overhanging into your yard.. you would save a few bucks once, and have an antagonistic relationship for the next 10-20 years of living next to them. Good luck getting the benefit of the doubt next time.
There is always someone out there trying to push on people just like you and the phrasing is not really that offensive and as one would say "tongue-in-cheek".
Do you enjoy finding weak people telling them "don't do this" when they barely step outside of "being utterly polite"?
Criticizing someone's mischaracterization of a book while acting like a meme isn't particularly interesting. If you're going to be smug, at least be creative about it.
Imagine seeing American wealth increase dramatically over the past several decades, see tax burdens drastically reduced on the top 0.1%, and see almost all of that drastic increase in wealth go to that 1%, and not be able to come up with a solution other than “well, against all evidence I think trade is zero sum”.
And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest.
It's easy to be upset when you see the wealthiest class of Americans spend all their money on cheap Chinese versions of what you build. Not even because they cannot afford your products, but simply because they can cost cut by going with China.
This rot is also existential, because as domestic players die, that knowledge is also lost.
The wealthiest Americans aren't buying shit from China, I have no clue where you managed to get that point from but they're buying boutique shit from Europe or elsewhere.
American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones.
People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that.
Like I said in my earlier post, the richest group of Americans is not the 1%. It's middle/upper middle/upper class suburbia.
This is even more pronounced because these are the people with cash who spend it. Billionaires aren't bingeing Amazon, shien and temu. That 60-90% class of Americans are the backbone of the economy. And they buy tons, tons, and more tons of Made in China.
You're right, I'm sorry, it's the 60-95%* that are the richest.
The one percentage have a staggering amount of wealth, but it's mostly in assets.
The "upper/upper middle class" have just as much, but it's much more heavily in cash. Those people and their spending is what keeps the economy moving. ~70% of GDP comes from them.
You should check the actual wealth distribution rather than just reading incessant "The 1%..." headlines.
I have looked at the stats. In the US the 1% own 31% of the wealth up from 23% in 1990. The 50-90% own 30% of the wealth down from 36% in 1990. The fact that their spending drives the economy is just more ammunition for better wealth redistribution.
It's crab bucket mentality. Poor Americans think if they just fuck over enough other people things will magically improve for them. But that's not how it works.
The cost of living skyrocketing is bad for blue collar workers. They suffer the most, actually, because proportionally more of their income is eaten. Salary-paid workers eat the cost much better. The wealthy, even better.
Wages are not increasing fast enough to replace the cost of food and materials. Materials matter because they make up everything. In the interim, hourly-paid employees are suffering.
You cannot increase wages without the money to do so. The factories are broke too. Manufacturing has these fundamental deficits that make it very capital punishing compared to software or finance, or consulting.
Britain is a better example of this because it's much smaller. The country is pretty much London with wealthy desk workers, and then the rest of country with hollowed out industry that is borderline 3rd world.
Naturally the economy wants to kill inefficient businesses, and let the workers fall off the societal wagon. So the question is how do you stop that.
The right says protect industry so they can have jobs, the left says tax rich people so they can have handouts.
This is true, but the problem is accelerated with poor fiscal policy like everything the Trump administration does. Tariffs ultimately hurt manufacturing, not desk workers. The idea was solid: implement tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing. Except, domestic manufacturing requires materials, which are now tariffed. And the tariffs are so volatile that any capital investment, outside of maybe datacenters and some others, is suicide.
The right says give them jobs, but in reality, their policy destroys jobs. It doesn't help that GOP fiscal policy also implodes the deficit further than it already is, so now you can't even use that money to stimulate businesses. We're stuck in a corner. It will take decades to fix this fiscal mess, and in the meantime a lot of people are going to suffer.
Have you even been to the UK? Or are you one of those terminally online experts on the "UK understanders" who just makes hyperbolic statements about the place? A bit like that guy Musk.
I'm not sure about the coastal elite view, but Trump was absolutely elected on the platform of I'll hurt the people who hurt you. You're correct about that.
The business-as-usual multi-international neoliberal supply chain model wasn't benefiting a vast number of Americans with no solution other than "don't complain look at these metrics we made up, you're doing great, don't be upset we are making billions while you struggle to afford to fix your teeth or fix your car". Something had to break and break it did.
If you are so non-zero sum, what would you suggest as the fix for those issues if we kept the old model?
Americans are upset about not having any money while being the richest and most powerful country in the world. They are throwing a temper tantrum about a world order they created and are the main beneficiary of.
There's a class of americans that didn't benefit from that world order. However, they elected someone who pretended he was going to help them, and actually is making it even worse for them and better for those who were already benefiting.
Here's what I don't get about this: Trump's main campaign promise was to raise prices for American consumers (via tariffs) and to harm the lowest wage earners the most (tariffs as sales taxes are regressive).
Going against "business as usual" resulted in higher prices, as predicted and promised.
Nearly everyone here benefited from lower prices afforded by reduced trade barriers. This isn't some obscure hidden fact.
The mistake here is letting the word benefit do all the heavy lifting. You cannot define benefit in a superficial way and expect things to make sense. Notions like "let them eat cake", or trickle-down-economics, also abuse and distort the notion of benefit. "System X benefitted all Americans in a trivial way" smacks of that kind of false reasoning.
You gotta think long term. This is going to cause all those lumber companies to plant more forests and 40 years from now when they’re big enough boom, 3 new jobs servicing the autonomous tree harvesters.
Yes the average is currently 45%. But that’s been like that since Sept 2025, when Trump increased it 10% with section 232 tariffs. Here’s the executive order
I read the article, I don't take away from it that Canadian lumber is suddenly 50% more expensive. It explains that tariffs for some Canadian lumber products was set to 50 percent at some point (or maybe lowered again, and raised, it's hard to tell since the Trump administration has issued 50+ different tariff directives in the last year), and that Canada walked away from negotiations recently.
I tried to do some more research before my coffee finishes in 5 minutes, you're right it's not ALL Canadian products or even all Canadian lumber products.
> Canadian negotiators also hoped to achieve some relief on softwood lumber tariffs that go back decades and were augmented with additional tariffs from Mr. Trump.
These are preexisting trade issues that were being negotiated. The new 50% tariffs are on other industries. Lumber trade issues predate this administration, and aren’t involved in the new 50% that’s put on $20B on other industries.
Not sure if you're joking, but I remember noticing the same thing last time I spent time there (2017). Lumber yards tend to have a lot of lumber. It's kind of like when you drive by a feed lot and they have an implausible number of cows (the ones over in imperial valley amazed me). Also there's always tankers by my house in Manhattan Beach. These anecdotes are not economic indicators.
