Ken's Comments

A friend posted a meme on Facebook titled "Trickle Down Economics" and it offers the following facts.  $2.3 trillion was spent in stimulus this year That's $23,000 per working age adult (assuming 100 million such adults) The meme goes on to say but "you got 1,200 per person & big companies got the rest." The meme wraps up by showing President Trump's signature, clearly intending to hold him responsible for this atrocity. I did something I rarely do on Facebook.  I posted a reply to something political.  Here is a version of my answer. In 2008 when 10 million Americans* were losing their homes, how many people got a check in any amount?  No one.  Who did get checks in the bailout packages?  AIG, Wall Street financiers, and the big banks - all of whom were involved in causing the economic meltdown. Contrast that with what happened this year, 2020.  What happened to the average American: Every American with incomes below a certai...

Almost anyone will tell you there are stark differences between Democrats and President Donald Trump.  I thought I'd call out some differences in a way that I have not seen anyone else do.  Two comparisons, one looking "back" to compare what the Democrats did to stimulate the economy under President Obama versus what President Trump did.  The other comparison looks forward - what is President Trump promising to do on the subject of jobs versus what the Democrat candidates for President are promising to do if they are elected.  But let's start with the look back. In 2009, President Barack Obama was sworn into office and joining him was a huge Democrat majority in the U.S. House and a "filibuster-proof" majority in the U.S. Senate.  Upon taking office, President Obama and the Democrats were faced with an economy in shambles.  They made it a top priority to develop and pass legislation in 2009 to stimulate the economy. In 2016, President Trump was sworn in...

I've been good at criticizing what is wrong with the economy, let me take a moment and say what I would have done differently to try to prevent us from getting to where we are right now. The answer starts in the approach - I would have attacked the problem from the bottom up, not the top down. There are a number of steps that could have been taken back when all this started to isolate the economic harm and create a gradual downturn instead of what did happen, which resulted in the economy falling off a cliff. This would not have been without pain, but a lot of the pain would have been absorbed by the lender, borrowers, and investors who took agreed to the risk of pain in the hope of financial reward. However, I think the result would have been fewer foreclosures and less people out of work. Ironically, both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have talked about trying to reduce foreclosures, but neither has any significant accomplishments. That's because th...