"micky" wrote in message
...
In alt.home.repair, on Mon, 19 Apr 2021 14:24:51 +0100, Bod
wrote:

On 19/04/2021 14:04, trader_4 wrote:
Lumber has skyrocketed over the last two years, most common lumber
doubling, or tripling in price. Among the reasons? Trump's tariffs on
Canada substantially reduced Canadian imports, while raising prices.
I hope the Trumpets are happy.

Yup, here's more info:

'Fed study finds Trump tariffs backfired'

https://www.marke****ch.com/story/fe...red-2019-12-27

The use of "backfire" in this headline makes the implicit assumption
that the goal of the tariffs was to make life better for a large number
of Americans.

People of all types, reporters, columnists, pundits, politicians,
"average Americans", and foreigners make this mistake all the time. The
people I just listed here still don't recognize that trump is a
sociopath or they don't understand all that that means. They think it
means someone who spits on the sidewalk or is rude. They don't imagine
someone who conjures up imaginative ways to hurt as many people as
possible.

In fact, the goal of the tariffs was to make life worse for all but
those selling lumber from USA sources, and it did that. The tariffs
were a success.

But don't imagine that the main goal was increased profit for American
lumber suppliers. That was a side benefit**. The main goal was to make
housing unaffordable for poor people, for the lower middle class, and to
force the middle class into smaller houses.

Do you find it hard to believe that this would be the *main* goal? You
probably do, because *you* are not a sociopath. Even when you're
selfish, your goal is to make life good for yourself, not to make life
bad for other people. Well, maybe you want to hurt selected minority
groups (not just race or religion. Maybe you don't like horse-owners or
alfalfa-growers or left-handed people, and maybe you know you don't like
them and want to hurt them, but still you can't imagine wanting to hurt
just about everyone. That's because you're not a sociopath. It might
be like trying to imagine homosexual desires when one is not homosexual.
It just doesn't seem real, or even possible. And afaict, there are so
few true sociopaths that it is even harder to imagine what one would be
like, or to recognize one when he sees one.

(Of course mass murderers are sociopathic, but people put them in a
separate category from people like trump.)

Trump did not limit his imagination to hurting Americans. For example,
attacking NATO and trying to weaken NATO was his method of making the US
but especially western Europe subject to Russian aggression. And
trying to extort Volodymyr Zelensky into claiming the Ukraine was
conducting an investigation into Biden was meant to help trump get
re-elected, but it's bigger goal was to delay arms to Ukraine, arms that
had been allocated and authorized by the Congress, in order to help
Russia seize greater portions of Ukraine.

So onlookers will never understand what trump does or why he does it
until they realize that his major goal is not helping himself but
hurting others.

That's mad. He really did want to support american timber producers.

He just ****ed up trying to do that.

**Maybe increased profits for the small number of domestic lumber
producers (compared to the number of people who want to live in houses)
was a side benefit of tariffs, or maybe it wasn't. If trump could have
hurt all the house buyers and the Canadian lumber producers AND the USA
lumber producers too that might have been preferable, but the way
economic systems work is that when you hurt one group, you tend to make
things better for another. Sociopaths don't like this latter part, but
they learn to live with it.