Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
There's nothing this guy is doing that is undermining the status quo in a way that helps the professional classes.
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That's my point. He's not helping the professional classes. And we're pissed about that. We're used to having a more robust SALT deduction. A lot of us were paid from, perhaps dependent upon, revenues from supply chains that have now been upset.
And we don't like very much that we're not respected as much as we were. We told everyone he was going to ruin everything (I believed that). Turns out the world didn't end, and the economy has actually done well under him. (Credit a considerable amount of that to Obama, but credit it also quite significantly to Trump.) ...Despite his doing a bunch of things we said would ruin it.
We liked being Brahmin. And now we're shown that a common lunatic can do all sorts of things from which we'd recoil and drive the economy even higher.
Kinda reminds me of Reagan. One can argue, of course, that like Reagan we're just running up huge debts. That's a good critique. But the reality seems to be, and you've said this many times yourself, public debt isn't a big deal. You're in good company, with Larry Summers and Joseph Stiglitz. If it was a good idea when they floated it years ago, why isn't it a good idea now? (Lemme guess... Because they said it should be done via govt spending, stimulus, rather than tax cuts. I'm not sure. Govt spending hasn't historically primed the pump very well since the New Deal, and even then it was temporary. Tax cuts, OTOH, seem to work. It's crazy, I know. But we're in crazy times, and we live grossly beyond our means anyway, so why not go Strangelove. Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Deficit?)