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Duties to offset unfair Canadian lumber practices do not cause housing price increases

• While the national average new single-family house price rose by roughly 40 percent between the first quarter of 2000 and the second quarter of 2005,1 lumber prices during the second quarter of 2005 were only about 1.6 percent higher than they had been during the first quarter of 2000.2

• Lumber costs account for roughly 2.5% of average house prices, a figure that has been falling in recent decades. In 1993, lumber costs accounted for approximately 4.25% of house prices.

Isn't this contrary to what free-traders tell us? Any time we get dumped on it's okay but heaven forbid we should look out for America and Americans first.

Here' more:

EXPERTS CONSISTENTLY FIND NAFTA CHAPTER 19 UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Department of Justice
"If such decisions were binding, they clearly would involve the exercise of 'significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,' and, thus, would transform the members of the panels and committees into 'officers of the United States' who must be appointed in the manner prescribed by the appointments clause of the Constitution.... [P]anels and committees (and, of course, the determinations they issued) would, thus, be rendered unconstitutional."

Testimony of Assistant Attorney General John O. McGinnis, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Judiciary, 100th Cong., 2nd Sess, 79 (1988).

“We firmly believe that language absolutely requiring the President to implement panel and committee decisions would be unconstitutional. . . . our testimony stresses that the Justice Department would oppose a provision that contained constitutionally deficient mandatory language,with the ‘authorizing’ language we favor inserted as a ‘fall-back’ in the event the mandatory formulation were held unconstitutional.”

Letter from Thomas M. Boyd, Acting Assistant Attorney General, to Peter W. Rodino, Jr., Chairman, Committee of the Judiciary, House of Representatives, May 24, 1988.

Isn't this contrary to what free-traders tell us? Any time we get dumped on it's okay but heaven forbid we should look out for America and Americans first.

But aren't home-buyers American? And aren't there more American home-buyers than Americans in the lumber industry? How does keeping out low-cost lumber constitute looking out for Americans first?