Donald’s Dow: Down and Down It Go

In case you are wondering, the Dow was at 19,827 on Jan. 20, 2017 – Trump’s Inauguration Day. It had bottomed out at 6,495 in early 2009 after the 2008 bank crash that happened when George W. Bush occupied the White House, whose deregulators let the housing mortgage bubble, and bubble and bubble into turmoil and trouble until finally it burst, exploding into the Great Recession.

 

During Barack Obama’s presidency, the Dow gained more than 13,000 points. Donald Trump inherited a market approaching Dow 20,000 and decided he owned it.

 

So yes, you Trump idiots, the bull market was, to the degree we attribute these things to presidents, an Obama market, built on his administration’s stimulus and auto bailout packages (and the ACA which substantially rationalized the economics of the health care component of our economy, which is, after all, don’t you know and you should, 20% of GDP).

 

And, not inconsequential to economic confidence, was the confidence inspired by a sane, rational, competent and excellent presidency.

 

Today, March 12, 2020, the Dow closed at 21,200. It has lost nearly 8,000 points in the past three weeks. It is no longer nearly 10,000 points higher than when Trump took office. That margin is down to 2,300 points and tonight, as this is written, futures are down a further 500 points. At its present pace, the market will be back within a week to where it was when Trump was inaugurated and then likely recede from that.

 

Were a competent, empathetic person president, the DOW drop would have been but half what it has been. The double down on the drop is all Trump and that Wall Street, not necessarily a smart or disciplined neighborhood in the best of times, at last, has recognized that he is incapable and that we have 10 months before Joe Biden becomes president and begins – begins, begins to restore responsibility, sanity, intelligence and civility to the most important public office in the world — in the world: The American presidency.

 

What party held the presidency in the market crashes of 1929, 1987, 2008 and now this one, 2020? Why the Republican Party, of course, the party that says it is the party of business. You know, sleepy old Calvin Coolidge who declared, “The business of America is business.”

 

What party left a balanced budget and/or declining federal budget deficits in 2000 and 2016 to incoming Republican presidents? The Democratic Party of course.

 

What party has driven the national debt up by hundreds of billions until it is now $2 trillion, nearly equal to GDP? Why the Republican Party, of course, the party that says it is the party of “fiscal responsibility”. Oh well, so much for truth, justice, and the American way.

 

See a pattern here folks? To quote Harry Truman, “Had enough?” Had enough of Republican fiscal and tax stupidity, rascality, lying, cheating, hypocrisy, wooly headed imbecility? It’s about time you all figured that out. it is long past time you smelled that out because as they say, the corpse stinks from the head and who is the head of that party now? Yah, Donald John Trump.

 

When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president the highest marginal income tax rate was 91%. When some of his economic advisors came to Ike, a very, careful, honest traditional conservative, and suggested that the top marginal rate should be reduced substantially, he said no. He said the people who earned it in those days — corporate executives mostly then in a time before Hedge funds and that sort of banditry — Ike said they could well afford it and let them pay it (adjusted of course on their returns).

 

In fact, the 91% top rate was reduced to 71% in the 1961 tax overhaul of what president? John F. Kennedy, a Democrat I do believe. And that was deemed radical. Today, negotiated back and forth between Republican and Democratic congresses over the past 40 years, the top marginal rate is now at a Republican low of 35%. What should it be in the interest of that Republican standard, fiscal responsibility? About where JFK had it 60 years ago. Oh yes, as Ike would have agreed, Jamie Dimon, poster boy for the top tenth of a percent, can well, well, well afford it and should have to pay it as a patriotic duty.

 

Four Republican presidents since 1980 have presided over and pushed their party’s lemming-like insistence that massive tax cuts grow the economy, with 90 percent of those cuts going to the top 1 percent of wealth holders and income earners, notwithstanding that  90 years ago John Maynard Keynes explained that what grows economies is public spending and investment.

 

And every time, every single fucking time, Republicans have pushed massive tax cuts. For 40 years now, ever time, without fail, that has resulted in massive deficits, piling up the national debt, creating one economic bubble or another – the savings and loan bubble, the market bubble, the housing finance bubble and now the sheer incompetence and stupidity bubble.

 

And every one of those bubbles burst, every one of those tax-cut infections has burst like a pestilential sore, spewing economic pus and corruption everywhere.

 

And each and every time a Democratic president has inherited the mess and been left to clean up the mess, to do what Republicans run on, proclaim and then do the opposite of – achieving fiscal responsibility, reducing deficits, controlling the national debt. Who has done, had to do that in the past 40 years? Democrats. Who has made the mess they rail against the past 40 years and then make all the worse? Republicans. And when one Republican, George H.W. Bush, undid some of the damage with a tax increase, his own party turned on him. After all, they had read his lips, the ones that had proclaimed no new taxes.

 

This is not partisanship, it is a fact. It is the undeniable, actual fiscal history of the past 40 years of the United States.  That needs to be repeated.

 

It is the undeniable, actual fiscal history of the United States of America that for the past 40 years Republicans have spilled red ink all over everything,  leaving Democrats to blot it up.

 

Well, now, to the degree this Republican imbecile,  Trump — and yes the Republican Party which owns him lock stock and barrel as he owns it — to the degree, Trump thinks the market is the economy, his economy is going, going going, GONE.