Trump weighing 25 percent lumber tariffs

[jmowreader]

36. In other words..."only The Rich should own homes"

The "little bit of a chance" thing Trump is talking about is no chance at all. He's talking about tariffing semiconductors in April but giving the manufacturers until then to set up factories in the US. Problem is, even if the semiconductor foundries needed to make semiconductors in the US existed - they do not and if they broke ground on a new foundry TODAY they wouldn't be making parts in it until after Trump's term ends - it takes longer than that to make parts. If you deliver a truckload of sand to a wafer factory this morning you won't see usable parts from that sand for three to four months. And all the foundries in the US are at full capacity. It's not just a question of adding shifts; semiconductors are actually grown in huge machines, and they don't grow any faster if you put more people on the floor.

Car factories take a long time to build, and sometimes even longer to get working properly. Think of when his best friend Elon decided to build an automated production line for his smaller cars. That system took so long to make cars before they got it right, fabricators from NASCAR teams were making cars faster than Tesla was.

Now, lumber: Obviously the presence of Canadian and Swedish SPF (spruce-pine-fir) lumber in the US market is giving him butthurt. But...guess what: the US lumber is more expensive because the Canadian and Swedish governments still own their timberland. The US sold all their land off decades ago. It is a hell of a lot cheaper for a producer to farm trees on government land and just pay royalties than it is to own land and pay taxes on it.