Higher lumber tariffs would slow recovery

Border taxes on imports will hinder rebuilding in areas hit by disasters

President Trump on Friday promised to help North Carolina and California rebuild faster. One way to do it would be to drop his threat to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada that would make disaster recovery slower and more expensive.

The President reiterated his tariff threat in video remarks to the World Economic Forum on Thursday. “We don’t need [Canada] to make our cars. We make a lot of them. We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests,” he said. “We don’t need their oil and gas, we have more than anybody.”

Mr. Trump is wrong on all three, but we’ll focus on lumber. The U.S. doesn’t produce enough lumber to meet domestic demand and thus imports about a third of the softwood used in home construction, mostly from Canada. Environmental policies restrict logging on public land in the American Northwest. Timber production has shifted to private land in the Southeast, but those forests must be managed so they aren’t over-logged.

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