Canada Cashes-in While America Pets Owls

Canadian sawmills are working overtime to satisfy China's insatiable appetite for wood imports, while American sawmills sit shuttered and rusting, because we evidently care more about "saving" spotted owls than saving American jobs. We were once a timber exporter; now we're an importer. Then some people wonder why our "trade deficit" is so out of whack. And this at a time when tens of millions of acres of federal forest are dying or burning, due to a failure of the federal government to aggressively and responsibly manage these lands.

It's another example of how far the U.S. has fallen, in terms of competitiveness and a lost instinct for economic self-preservation, that Canada is cashing-in on the Chinese building boom while we sit complacently on the sidelines, handing out welfare checks and petting spotted owls.