Why you’re going to pay $24,000 too much for a house
Join me for a trip down memory lane back to the heady days of 2017, when, under the very best thinking brought to you by the crackpots and game-show hosts of the Trump administration, our government decided that one of the biggest and more urgent problems facing Americans was a splendid supply of inexpensive lumber — specifically, that those wily, inscrutable, nefarious . . . Canadians were selling the stuff too cheap in U.S. markets, thereby undercutting the critical economic position of — oh, I don’t know, Paul Bunyan, I guess.
The underlying issue was an esoteric dispute about something called stumpage: Most U.S. timber is harvested on private lands, while most Canadian timber is harvested on public lands (“Crown lands,” as our monarchist neighbors to the north call them), with Ottawa charging a fee that is, in the estimate of the Trump administration, too low. That’s trade protectionism in a nutshell: It’s more expensive and more difficult to do certain kinds of business in the United States than it is in Canada, and the obvious solution for that is to make it more expensive and more difficult to do business in Canada and pass on those prices to American consumers. Ingenious!
If you get enough clowns together, a circus is bound to break out.
. . .
The stupid that presidents do lives after them.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
