Project 2025 even documented how this would work
I guess we’re to believe that forests are being poorly managed by every government in every country around the world?
Or a Reichstag fire Emergency? The Reichstag fire was Hitler's pretext for declaring the national emergency that ended democracy during his reign.
Mussolini did it earlier in 1922 but the pretext was more vague. So perhaps just a Mussolini emergency?
This feels like “adding any job no matter the job” is the goal, as opposed to investing in our citizenry through education, training and using subsidies to help with the transitioning to better paying employment like high tech manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, professional trades etc.
We should really be focusing on the quality of jobs added and encourage that growth, preferably with an eye on long term stability
However I don’t think it’s the electorate that wants it now the same way a petulant child wants a toy. It’s the lack of clear vision and support that makes the electorate so desperate for it to happen. If we were to actually reinvest in our citizenry (meaning the wealthy in this country would need to pay a little more in taxes) and have proper support for people in the meantime the public would be supportive and it would be better for the country as a whole.
Instead it seems the US is trying to inch its way to becoming some type of modern Game of Thrones
What does this look like? Progressive taxes go up, better safety nets, those are straightforward. What does a solid middle class look like when all the cheap labor manufacturing comes back to automation (~8% of US jobs are manufacturing).
The US service sector is almost 80% of the economy. We are walking into perpetual labor shortages due to structural demographics. So perhaps we don’t need “good, union jobs” and instead need to make sure people are paid enough to live comfortable lives, regardless of job (services, manufacturing, whatever). Some combination of universal healthcare (squeeze out the profit potential, cram down non care costs), public housing (see how Austria does it) to prevent investor capture, increasing the minimum wage further faster, etc.
Maybe it’s not union jobs as you point out, but I agree that there’s a real cost of living crisis where minimum wage jobs are simply too far from a reasonable (not even comfortable) existence.
For instance, they don't know who was president in 2020, and everyone thought "the economy" was bad for the last four years at the same time as they answered surveys saying they personally were doing great.
See:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/02/16/will-stancil-repeti...
Stancil isn’t wrong per se, he’s quite right in many respects but I don’t know that his work captures the many facets of what is (and was at the time) going on
I saw one argument that people didn't like high interest rates, but if everyone is saying they are doing fine but have heard other imaginary people are doing badly, that most likely means they've picked up bad vibes from the media.
Most of HN would rationally answer a survey that way. High paid tech job, flexible hours, good benefits. But also informed enough to know that many others are struggling and financially insecure.
Depending on how the questions were asked, even a person barely getting by might respond that they were personally doing OK (employed, insured, able to pay rent and groceries) while knowing that the economic situation for their friends, family, neighbors was rough and knowing that if they got laid off tomorrow that they'd struggle to find an equivalent replacement job.
[1]: https://www.eworldtrade.com/blog/top-10-wood-producing-count...
The simpler explanation is that we have (or had) a free trade agreement with Canada, and it's just plain cheaper for all parties to import or export when/where the supply chain is already present.
[1]: https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wood-products...
There are also regional specializations. Like, BC has a substantial amount of Western Red Cedar which the north western states can’t meet the demand for alone.
We also send raw materials to be processed by mills in the USA. This isn’t as common as it once was. Then we also send lumber which US mills process. Some examples would be fir boards would are turned into flooring, window sash, stair treads, etc. BC produces a ton of material like this which is fodder for all kinds of mills, large and small. We try to keep that business here, but we tend to mostly dimension raw materials for export, rather than actually mill them and add any meaningful value.
We import a lot of hardwood lumbers from the USA. I’ve personally bought and milled American hardwoods for furniture in my home. We have beautiful hardwoods in Canada, but there are a lot in the USA we simply don’t grow, or at least not commercially.
Beef and pork are another example I can think of though, this has to do with specific cuts and quality for various markets.
> Canada exports 45 billion CAD (USD ~30 billion) yearly, mostly to the USA
https://vizhub.com/curran/canadian-exports-to-us-treemap?mod...
According to this (2022) it seems lower than that?
There are ways to log that do decrease fire risk, but generally those are not the techniques used in industrial logging since they are less profitable and tend to leave quite a few trees standing.
Here’s a good primer that lays out the basicshttps://davidsuzuki.org/expert-article/will-logging-more-in-...
This doesn't so much address the health of forest ecosystems so much as remove them, which really fucks stuff up. Habitat destruction, changes to waterways and luvial fauna, soil erosion. We already do a lot of timber farming, like a lot of DT policies it's hard not to read this as a simply spiteful move.
Honestly I’d love to see the world move away from timber to an easier to manage renewable resource. Whatever happened to those homes made out of 100% recycled material?