Monday, December 11, 2017

Impeaching The Goose That Lays The Golden Eggs

As I was savoring yet another great week for my 401K recently, it dawned on me that yes, indeed, a rising Trump tide lifts all boats. There are a ton of state, local, university and union pension plans invested in the market that are in a world of hurt from over-promising their employees. They all assumed insane rates of growth in the markets to stay solvent and up until this year, a whole bunch of them were staring at bankruptcy.

Now we have insane rates of growth in the markets and, for some of them at least, things aren't looking so dire.

Now we must impeach the president.

Good idea. That won't put an end to this stock run that's saving their bacon.

President Trump is a clear and present danger.
How hard would it be to behave normally and just rip every word out of his mouth, but let him stay in office while he staves off catastrophe for the blue states and unions? In the old days, that's what wise politicians did on both sides. Now we're so enraged that we'll take fiscal collapse just to get rid of Trump. That many of their constituents and employees will see their pensions practically zeroed out is of no consequence to the crazies.

Can't anybody here play this game?

3 comments:

tim eisele said...

The stock market is doing fine as far as it goes, but . . .

If you extend that graph back to just before 2007, and just before 1999, you will see similar runups in value, just before everything goes pear-shaped. And I remember what the pundits were saying both of those times, that there was nothing to worry about. And we know what happened then.

It has been almost 7 years since the end of the "Great Recession". Since WWII, the average period between recessions has been a bit under 5 years, and the absolute longest was only 10. I expect we will have another recession fairly soon, probably this coming year. The only question is, will it be a relatively mild one followed by a long period of lackadasical growth like in the early 2000s, or will it be a humdinger of a crash like in 2007-2008? I guess we are going to see.

tim eisele said...

I do agree that trying to impeach Trump would be a dumb thing to do, though. Even though I am completely unimpressed with him as a president, he is serving one useful purpose. The fact that everyone mistrusts him and wants to prevent him from abusing his power is going to result in a lot of the kinglike powers that the Presidency has accumulated being rolled back. Impeaching him will just turn him into a victim (like it did with Clinton), and is actually likely to strengthen his hand instead of weakening it.

ligneus said...

Just keep repeating, Not Hillary, Gorsuch, Betsy Devoss, Pruitt, Jerusalem. If he doesn't do anything else [and btw he has done tons else] that should be enough for patriotic Americans to thank God for finding the right person just in time. Funny how that works, Churchill, Maggie, Reagan, Lech Walesa, Merkel. [OK I'm kidding on one of them!]