If there are ten more framers or roofers who are working instead of shooting heroin, I’m 100% for it.
MAGA.
And things from Mexico. But he is comforting the dreamers, so maybe you can feed your family that.. not! He has done some great exec orders, but those are just headliners... his real work is Amnesty.
These days, lumber and labor are only a small percentage of the cost of constructing a house. All the land associated regulatory costs have risen dramatically since the 1990’s, and the cost of copper (wiring and plumbing) have as well. Even roofing materials tripled in the 2000’s when oil prices jumped. That’s not even considering the increased costs of higher quality finish materials generally used today (tile, marble, etc).
I don’t recall seeing horror stories about the cost of building houses when these prices rose.
No you don't and making the over priced Canadian lumber 20% more costly should, along with some MAGA removal of EPA rules on logging, make American lumber more available and employ more American workers in the process.
A tariff on anything raised the price U.S. consumers pay.
It used to be, wet backs were cleaning up the job sites. Now, they're the framers, roofers, masons, etc.,. Mr. and Mrs. New Homeowner are stuck with an, in plain English, pile of shit home.
The Indians answering customer service calls aren't reducing your bills, it's going to company profits and coming out as big bonuses for big boys. All the while you're screaming into a phone about getting $32.00 cut from your cell phone bill.
That's the beauty of tariffs. Bye-Bye Crony Capitalist! You can tell by how loudly they are winning to their mouthpieces at the WSJ.
Tariffs and rent seeking always help the protected class, at least temporarily.
It will allow harvesting of our forests by American companies. I don’t know how many lumber companies and sawmills in the Pacific Northwest were shutdown and their employees forced to become welfare dependents.
Yes in the short term there will be cost increases. In the long term the costs will come down and thousands of people will go off of the government teat and become self-supporting and proud of themselves once again that they can support themselves and their families.
Then Canada will have to REMOVE it’s tariffs to lower the price back down.
If Trump did this unilaterally, that would be bad. But since Canada does it to our products, we have to do it back OR our wood industry goes south - OOPS!!! That part already happened because the previous administrations were PUSSIES.
>>You don’t help the middle class by making housing more expensive.<<
Principles have costs.
The reason we are the patsies of the entire world has been the unwillingness to shoulder the costs that go along with REAL fair free trade.
Construction of new homes, not homes in general. We’ll see.
“You don’t help the middle class by making housing more expensive.”
Maybe it hurts a little in the short term, but you DO help the remaining Middle Class from falling into the Poverty Class by making it less desirable to import ‘stuff’ that we in North America should be producing ourselves!
I’m all for figuratively, ‘closing the borders’ as well as physically.
Canada doesn’t want our milk? Well, bite me! Wisconsin doesn’t want your lumber!
Mr. Ross didn’t put it quite that way. He said the Administration will impose a 20% tariff on softwood lumber imports from Canada, which total about $5 billion at year. But that’s a lot of lumber and the tariff will add an additional $1 billion in new costs for U.S. construction. Most of those costs will be added to the price of new American housing, not counting the higher costs that will come as U.S. producers raise their prices to match the competition and pad their bottom lines.
Yet while the cross-border haggling drags on, middle America is where the new lumber tariff will hit hardest. According to the National Association of Home Builders, 28% of U.S. softwood lumber purchases are Canadian imports and these are particularly important in the construction of single-family homes. Roughly 7% of the cost of an American home is the lumber
...
So that’s 20% of 28% of 7%, or .3 %. I wonder why it wasn’t expressed that way.
That’s three tenths of a percentage of the price of a home, worst case. Most likely builders can find other ways to cut costs.
Looks like the same tariff which has been in effect for the last 15 years. The negotiations for continuing it has been going on for 2 years.
The money is supposed to go to US mills to offset cheap logs from the Canadian govt.
I wish every globalist at the No-Wall Street Urinal would simply stuff it. NO COUNTRY EVER IMPORTED AND RETAILED ITSELF INTO PROSPERITY.
Please you don’t help the middle class by letting foreign governments dump subsidized products into your nation destroying their jobs.
Take your neocon nonsense elsewhere. Nearly 40 years now your arguments have allowed the direct theft of this nations jobs and wealth, so a select few could pas their pockets getting their 30 pieces of silver for being the traitors they are.
Words are not deeds. Unfortunately, a look at the Reagan record leads to the question: With free traders like this, who needs protectionists? Consider that the administration has done the following:
-- Forced Japan to accept restraints on auto exports. The agreement set total Japanese auto exports at 1.68 million vehicles in 1981-82, 8 percent below 1980 exports. Two years later the level was permitted to rise to 1.85 million.(33) Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution found that the import limits have actually cost jobs in the U.S. auto industry by making it possible for the sheltered American automakers to raise prices and limit production. In 1984, Winston writes in Blind Intersection? Policy and the Automobile Industry, 32,000 jobs were lost, U.S. production fell by 300,000 units, and profits for U.S. firms increased $8.9 billion. The quotas have also made the Japanese firms potentially more formidable rivals because they have begun building assembly plants in the United States.(34) They also shifted production to larger cars, introducing to American firms competition they did not have before the quotas were created. In 1984, it was estimated that higher prices for domestic and imported cars cost consumers $2.2 billion a year.(35) At the height of the dollar's exchange rate with the yen in 1984-85, the quotas were costing American consumers the equivalent of $11 billion a year.(36)
-- Tightened up considerably the quotas on imported sugar. Imports fell from an annual average of 4.85 million tons in 1979-81 to an annual average of 2.86 million tons in 1982-86. Not only did this continued practice force Americans to spend more than other consumers for sugar, but it created hardships for Latin American countries and the Philippines, which depend on sugar exports for economic development. The quota program undermined President Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative and intensified the international debt crisis.(37)
-- Negotiated to increase restrictiveness of the Multifiber Arrangement and extended restrictions to previously unrestricted textiles. The administration unilaterally changed the rule of origin in order to restrict textile and apparel imports further and imposed a special ceiling on textiles from the People's Republic of China.(38) Finally, it pressured Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, the largest exporters of textiles and apparel to the United States, into highly restrictive bilateral agreements. All told, textile and apparel restrictions cost Americans more than $20 billion a year.(39) The Reagan administration has stated several times that textile and apparel imports should grow no faster than the domestic market.(40)
-- Required 18 countries--including Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Finland, and Australia, as well as the European Community--to accept "voluntary restraint agreements" to reduce steel imports, guaranteeing domestic producers a share of the American market. When 3 countries not included in the 18--Canada, Sweden, and Taiwan-- increased steel exports to the United States, the administration demanded talks to check the increase. The administration also imposed tariffs and quotas on specialty steel. These policies, with their resulting shortages, have severely squeezed American steel-using firms, making them less competitive in world markets and eliminating more than 52,000 jobs.(41)
-- Imposed a five-year duty, beginning at 45 percent, on Japanese motorcycles for the benefit of Harley Davidson, which admitted that superior Japanese management was the cause of its problems.(42)
-- Raised tariffs on Canadian lumber and cedar shingles.
-- Forced the Japanese into an agreement to control the price of computer memory-chip exports and increase Japanese purchases of American-made chips. When the agreement was allegedly broken, the administration imposed a 100 percent tariff on $300 million worth of electronics goods. This episode teaches a classic lesson in how protectionism comes back to haunt a country's producers. The quotas established as a result of the agreement have created a severe shortage of memory chips and higher prices for American computer makers, putting them at a disadvantage with foreign competitors. Only two American firms are still making these chips, accounting for a small percentage of the world market.(43)
-- Removed Third World countries from the duty-free import program for developing nations on several occasions. -- Pressed Japan to force its automakers to buy more American-made parts.(44)
-- Demanded that Taiwan, West Germany, Japan, and Switzerland restrain their exports of machine tools, with some
market shares rolled back to 1981 levels. Other countries were warned not to increase their shares of the U.S. market.
-- Accused the Japanese of dumping roller bearings, because the price did not rise to cover a fall in the value of the yen. The U.S. Customs Service was ordered to collect duties equal to the so-called dumping margins.(45)
-- Accused the Japanese of dumping forklift trucks and color picture tubes.(46)
-- Failed to ask Congress to end the ban on the export of Alaskan oil and of timber cut from federal lands, a measure that could substantially increase U.S. exports to Japan.
-- Redefined "dumping" in order "to make it easier to bring charges of unfair trade practices against certain competitors."(47)
-- Beefed up the Export-Import Bank, an institution dedicated to promoting the exports of a handful of large companies at the expense of everyone else.(48)
-- Extended quotas on imported clothespins.
Destroy the American lumber industry thus lowering compitition, has what effect on prices? Unleash American lumber.
I watched the presser, Wilbur was right on every point. I was very impressed.
This is a stupid position for WSJ to take, “Housing Tax”. That’s a lie of omission. So they are fake news too.
Deport all the illegals and we wouldn’t need so many new homes and wouldn’t need to import lumber.