THE LUMBERING PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES: I’ve been watching the Bush-Kerry debates (and the Cheney-Edwards sideshow), trying to figure out what they’re all about. One thing for sure: they’re not about truth and accuracy. Mister Cheney couldn’t even cite the right website for factual verity; he told people to go to www.factcheck.com, when in fact he wanted www.factcheck.org. And then it turned out that factcheck.org disagreed with Cheney on the issue regarding Haliburton and Iraq, the exact point he was disputing with Mr. Edwards when citing the factcheck site. Not that Kerry and Edwards don’t mangle the truth either. If you check out factcheck.org, they will give you a long list of Democratic Party sins too.

We still have another debate to go, but thus far the most memorable moment (for me) was the lumber thing on Friday night. To recap, Mister Bush was criticizing Mister Kerry’s plan to raise taxes for people making more than $200,000 per year, saying that it would hurt small businesses. Kerry responded by saying that Bush relied upon a convoluted tax code definition of “small business”, and thus wasn’t referring to real small businesses. To nail down the point, Kerry cited Mister Bush himself, who qualifies under our tax law as a small business subject to personal tax rates, given that he received $84 from his investment in a lumber company in 2001. Bush then gave Kerry a dramatic and humorous response, denying any involvement on his part in lumber; he hoped to show America that Kerry doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. “Want some wood?”

It would have been a master stroke, a crushing blow against Kerry, had the facts been on Mister Bush’s side. But for better or for worse, they weren’t. Within a few minutes after the debate closed on Friday night, the factcheck.org site explained the nature of Bush’s interest in a foresting venture formed in 2003 by Bush’s business trust and an investment partner, and backed it up with a document filed with the IRS. (Yes, Mr. Kerry got the years mixed up; the $84 in 2001 wasn’t from lumber, but it did in fact make Bush a “small business” for tax purposes).

I suppose that the Democrats will make hay out of Mr. Bush’s confident and totally inaccurate response about his own financial affairs. This is obviously good material for a negative ad (which we won’t get to see here in New Jersey since Kerry and Bush hardly spend any advertising money in the “locked in” states; our nation really should re-think the whole rationale behind the Electoral College system). But those ads probably won’t be show-stoppers. Most people can forgive the President for not immediately remembering everything that his personal business manager is doing while he’s in the White House running the country. Bush is a rich hombre, and the lumber venture came to only about $250,000 (with Mister Bush’s trust assumedly putting up half). What’s a piddling $125,000 to a rich guy who has the world on his shoulders?

However, there is an interesting angle to the “want some wood” incident. If you do a Google or Yahoo or AllTheWeb on “Bush” and “lumber”, you will find the usual partisan blogs hashing out the pros and cons regarding their candidate’s performance. But you will also see references to another issue, one of those hidden little things that can actually affect your life. Those references regard Mr. Bush’s 2002 implementation of protective tariffs against Canadian lumber. The federal bureaucracy in charge of foreign trade decided that Canada was unfairly subsidizing their foresting and lumber industry (not that we don’t help ours), and decided to impose taxes to protect American lumber corporations from low-priced Canadian wood that could bankrupt American companies like Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade and Louisiana-Pacific, at which point the Canadians would jack their prices way up. Those evil Canadians — hmm, aren’t they also trying to sell us prescription drugs at low prices, with Mister Bush again protecting America from such chicanery?

Anyway, if you check out the various web sites that discuss the 2002 Canadian lumber tariff, you will realize that American consumers are bearing the brunt of higher wood prices. You weekend handymen (and handywomen) who frequent the Home Depot know darn well just how expensive lumber has become over the past few years. And anyone buying a new house or fixing up the old one will feel the pinch too. But don’t worry, the American lumber investors are doing just fine because of that.

Hmm, in 2002, George W. Bush imposed lumber tariffs that protect American lumber investors. Then in 2003, he becomes an American lumber investor (via his business trust). Yea, there’s always a story behind the story, isn’t there.

But just to be fair, let me admit – there are real jobs at stake out in Oregon and Washington state because of lumber prices. The world is terribly complex, despite the efforts of politicians to make it seem simple. I myself think the government has to help workers who are displaced by economic changes and international trade, such as all the manufacturing jobs that were lost out in Ohio and Michigan, and now all the computer programmer jobs in New Jersey and California that went overseas. The federal government can help to retrain displaced workers and relocate them to other areas where help is needed. And yes, maybe give them some “welfare” until they get back on their feet. But in the end, you can’t stop progress. If India can program computers and Canada can provide wood cheaper than we can, well — we gotta go with the flow, and gotta keep on looking to put our workers into the things that America can do better.