The US housing market is melting. Trump’s solution: 50-year mortgages instead of 30-year loans. As an economist, I can tell you 50 years or 30 years don’t mean squat. This is Trump the Distractor at his best.
Dear President The Donald. Housing prices are up because of your tariffs on Canadian lumber and aluminum, killing new home construction. Donald, we get lumber from Canada because they have something we don’t have: trees.
Canada has 318 billion trees, 8,953 trees for every Canuck, whereas the US, after our clear-cutting spree, has a paltry 716 trees per US citizen.
And we get aluminum from Canada because they’ve got something else we don’t got: electricity, electricity from clean hydroelectric dams. (Yep, they have lots of water, too.) Electricity is the costliest ingredient in aluminum smelting. It takes about 14,000 kilowatt hours of juice to make one ton of aluminum. Yow! Power from Quebec costs a smelter about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, roughly half the US charge.
Well, shouldn’t I credit President The Donald with saving US jobs?
Nope.
What we’ve done is traded construction jobs ($45.75/hour on average) for logging and sawmill jobs ($22.48/hour). Hey, thanks, Mr. President.
(Sorry about all the numbers, but that’s what you get for subscribing to a data journalist’s column.)
And to add to the pain, the rising cost of construction caused by tariffs raises the costs of homes, raises overall inflation and is forcing the Fed to keep interest rates high.
Trump, though, claims that the original purpose of these tariffs is to punish Canada for flooding the US with fentanyl. Yes, all those violent Canadian drug cartels! (Admittedly, the most POLITE drug lords, eh?)
Here’s what it comes down to. To save a few lumberjack jobs, Trump has given away what was once an American birthright: a home of one’s own.
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