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While we have seen and read about the carnage in agriculture and this week saw the impacts on US manufacturing, a less obvious industry is being devastated by Trump's tariff war. US hardwood mills are closing, possibly for good, after losing half of their sales to Russia and southeast Asia. Trump's ill-advised tariff war is hurting consumers, our corporations, and workers who need that paycheck to put food on the table.
See the bolded part. In my area there are only two HARDWOOD mills/buyers, and yes they have slowed down just in the past month or so and aren't buying logs right now. This stuff goes overseas to be made into furniture and who knows what. The other mills that make structural lumber, OSB, and plywood are hopping though, and a couple that were shut down during the Obama era have re-opened thanks to the Tariff's because prior to that Canadian wood products were pricing them out.
But the article tried so hard. They found an industry who's gravy train dried up and were able to cite 100 lost jobs and 30 corporate layoffs in the ENTIRE country.
And watching these frauds from the left. China is now getting it's hardwoods from countries that will destroy anything for a nickel.
Damage will be done around the globe because of China's decision here. Yet our fake environmentalists want to blame Trump.
Why? Because they don't ACTUALLY care about the environment.
Yeah, I was just about to remark about how all of a sudden The Left is just all about cutting down trees and selling the wood....
I remember the good ol' days when Lefty used to chain himself to a tree and dare someone to cut it.
Refresh my memory: The last president to not impose tariffs was...
*Due to the government indoctrination centers warping the minds of statists I'll answer the question for them.
Answer: NOBODY
Tariffs have advantage only when they are balanced.
Every tariff gives an advantage to only one small sector of a nation's economy. Unless the tariff is balanced, it will always harm another domestic economic sector.
So, in Japan, a nation that survives on export but still needs to be able to feed its people, the farmers are protected by tariffs because there are so few of them and the Japanese farmland is so small.
The population of Japan is too large for their farmers to feed them all, all the time. In the worst case, Japan's farmers could keep all the citizens alive, but in a state of semi-starvation.
The Japanese farmers are mostly aging, and like here, their children have left the land to make more money in the big city. So the tariffs help the farmers while offering their kids a life back on the farm. Even though Japan's arable land is tiny, it still needs more human hands to make a crop as it ever did.
So Japan only tariffs some critical foodstuffs. But it's manufacturing sector has no tariffs. That's the balance their economy needs.
Trump's tariffs have no balance in them, as he uses tariffs as a punishment. They have no incentives in them, and as punishment, the tariffs always hurt Americans more than the other country in a free-market world.
But the article tried so hard. They found an industry who's gravy train dried up and were able to cite 100 lost jobs and 30 corporate layoffs in the ENTIRE country.
And watching these frauds from the left. China is now getting it's hardwoods from countries that will destroy anything for a nickel.
Damage will be done around the globe because of China's decision here. Yet our fake environmentalists want to blame Trump.
Why? Because they don't ACTUALLY care about the environment.
I was preparing to sell a couple truckloads of hardwood logs to a company that simply exports them. Now that they aren't buying, yeah it hurts a little, but trucking was going to take off about 40% of the gains and it wasn't much more at the end of the day compared to using or selling it for firewood. Forestry is set up very sustainable and renewable at least in our area, they log and replant plots on a rotating basis and things have changed a lot from the clear-cut and sell practices of decades ago. The wood that used to go to waste is now chipped up and glued/pressed into sheets of OSB instead.
Should make the cost of building a New Home in the US more affordable.
New Home sales are up the last few months and construction is strong.
It has, if you remember the last round of major hurricane damage, wood building materials went nuts and I remember seeing OSB for $17-$18 a sheet and double that for plywood. Last Friday at HD it was $7.19 for OSB and $15 for plywood.
Didn't read the link, huh? It is about exporting lumber. The export market has been cut in half by the tariff war. Like soybeans. And corn. Mills HERE are closing. American jobs are being lost.
Lumber mills in Northwest Montana have already closed. Most of them shut down and were torn down long before trump. Logging is nearly at a standstill.
Why, you ask?
Many of us believe the biggest reason is incessant lawsuits stopping logging on Forest Service lands. They even sued to stop clearing beetle killed trees!
What little logging that is being done is mostly on privately owned tree farms. Where there used to be 5 or 6 sawmills there are now one, maybe two. Where there once was a plywood plant and a medium density fiberboard plant, there is now nothing.
Montana was once a net exporter of logs and milled lumber. Now we are an importer, because we can't cut the trees that grow here, mill them into lumber, and make fiberboard and paper out of the waste.
A number of factors drove up the price of wood. They include pent-up demand for new houses or additions following the recession, forest fires last year in western Canada that destroyed prime forests and shuttered mills for up to two months, a trade dispute between the United States and Canada, and hurricanes and other weather that created demand for repairs and new homes. A shortage of railcars and trucks also made it more difficult to transport lumber.
Tell dems to pass the USMCA
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