You do realize the tax cut was going to expire and every Dem voted against extending it in the new bill along with other tax deduction benefits?
(Grok)
The Trump Card...
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(Grok)
Thank you for doing your homework and giving us something meaningful to discuss. You refer to "the tax cut" but then flood the post with references to multiple tax changes and their purported impacts. You're getting closer but this is still meaningless. I'm genuinely interested in knowing exactly how these multiple programs each work (no longer a $3000 single cut). If you can give me the list of the names of each item you are talking about, not some claimed result by a think tank, I'll do my own research. I do appreciate you providing this much so far.
One of the items you mention is fully named: "2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)." Is that correct? What are the others?
When my research is complete, I'll also research the tax cuts Trump gave to the billionaires and millionaires. Our federal debt is soaring because of those. That will put us close to the actual tax policy Trump actually got through Congress and its actual impact on the country and its citizens.
Spoiler alert: I believe the research will show that Trump's tax policies have greatly accelerated the decline of the middles class, and the concentration of wealth in billionaire hands.
But I'm not going to rush to the billionaire part. I want firsr to be able to explain back to you the Trump tax cuts you mention in a way that you agree is fair and true.
Does keeping the tax cuts in place instead of letting them expire help or hurt the middle class? Does having much lower gas prices help or hurt the middle class? Does not having runaway inflation help or hurt the middle class? Does having lower interest rates help or hurt the middle class? Does working wages rising faster than inflation help or hurt the middle class? All of this happened in Trump’s first year of his second term.
Does keeping the tax cuts in place instead of letting them expire help or hurt the middle class?
That's what I want to determine by looking at the FULL impact of ALL tax cuts, including those given to the billionaires.
Does having much lower gas prices help or hurt the middle class?
Everyone benefits from lower fuel prices, except the oil companies Trump wants to help with "Drill baby drill." If the cost of drilling exceeds the price they can get for the crude, drilling stops. Fuel prices are declining for supply and demand reasons. They keep discovering more and more of it. They keep getting more efficient at extracting it. And a slowing economy reduces the demand for fuel.
Does not having runaway inflation help or hurt the middle class?
Obviously, keeping inflation low is good for lower, middle, and upper class alike. But tagging inflation in a given month or year to a given president provides more fog than clarity.
Here's the annual inflation rate from 2019 through 2025:
2019 1.8%
2020 1.2%
2021 4.7%
2022 8.0%
2023 4.1%
2024 2.9%
2025 2.7%
Notice the trend. Inflation was below 2% in 2019 and 2020. In 2021 and 2022, it shot up to peak at 8.0%. The inflation rate then declined in the last three years.
The 2% inflation target is the official goal of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and most other major central banks around the world. It's considered a "Goldilocks" number: not too high to disrupt the economy, but high enough to avoid dangerous stagnation.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can analyze the now-known inflation numbers and the events that caused it. The economy ground to a halt when government mandates closed businesses, schools, churches, imposed movement restrictions, etc. to fight COVID-19. The US Federal Reserve Bank responded by increasing liquidity (printing money).
When they increase the amount of money in the economy, it makes it easier and cheaper for people to borrow and spend. When that happens, prices go up because there are more dollars competing for the same items. Put another way, sellers raise their prices because (1) people will pay them, and (2) sellers see their costs increasing.
Those were amazing days. The government literally handed business people a ton of money at very low interest rates and they later forgave the loan, converting that money into a well-timed gift. The government also padded the pockets of individuals with previously unheard of unemployment pay.
There are a lot of so-called business people in legal trouble now because they did not properly use or account for the many thousands of dollars of "free money" they received. You may know of some who spent a ton of this "free money" on vacations or goods they did not need and improperly purchased under the loan rules. You may have heard of others who gamed the system to gain vast sums of COVID-19 money they were not legally entitled to receive. While those legal problems are happening now, when the money was available, people freely spent the money, thereby providing the economic boost the Federal Reserve Bank hoped to provide.
The Federal Reserve Bank initiated massive liquidity injections starting in March 2020. This response included lowering interest rates to near zero and launching open-ended quantitative easing, where the Fed purchased trillions of dollars in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities to stabilize the economy. These actions began during the presidency of Donald Trump.
| Event | Date | President |
| First emergency rate cut (0.50%) | March 3, 2020 | Donald Trump |
| Rate cut to near zero and $700B QE launch | March 15, 2020 | Donald Trump |
| Open-ended QE and new credit facilities announced | March 23, 2020 | Donald Trump |
| Expansion of lending programs (up to $2.3T in loans) | April 9, 2020 | Donald Trump |
| Continued monthly asset purchases ($120B/month) | 2020 - 2021 | Donald Trump / Joe Biden |
It takes a while for the effects of such liquidity injections to fully manifest. That's why you see a lag between the actions and peak inflation.
Biden critics and Trump supporters are quick to blame Biden for inflation. But a rational analysis of the actual history and results undermine that view.
So, yes, lower inflation is good for everyone. But the cause of inflation is not easily pinned on a particular president. There are many moving parts in the economy and all of them are inflationary or deflationary in one way or another.
You may be interested to know that the Federal Reserve Bank recently changed it's policy to pump more money into the economy., It's called quantitative easing, which reverses the quantitative tightening policy it maintained until recently. If Trump gets his way and gets a Fed chair who wants to lower interest rate, that too will be inflationary because it make it easier for people to borrow and spend money.
When COVID was underway, the Fed treated it like an economic emergency and they poured trillions of dollars of new money into the economy. Today's quantitative easing actions are inflationary but more measured. But something else is going on in which the Fed is reactive, not proactive, and it could (actually is) add a lot of fuel and oxygen to the inflation fire.
Responding to Trump's heavy-handed trade actions and military adventurism, many nations of the world are uniting against the US. Part of that includes the BRICS countries which are engaged in "de-dollarization." That's a major topic in itself. For this post's purposes, I'll speak only about their purchasing and holding far fewer US Treasury bonds than they used to.
The US government finances its deficit spending by borrowing money. They borrow that money by selling Treasury bonds to other nations, financial institutions and individual investors. For decades, the central banks of other countries and financial institutions there freely bought these bonds because they were deemed a safe investment. The ready market for these bonds meant the US Treasury Department could offer them at favorable interest rates (the Treasury pays the interest to the bondholders, which is why the bondholders buy them).
But a secular change is now underway. To reduce their dependency on the US dollar, foreign countries, institutions and investors have drastically cut back on their US Treasury holdings. They are buying less of them and selling a lot of what they have in the bond market. This is driving up the cost the Treasury Department must pay -- the higher interest rate it must offer -- to get people to buy the bonds, so the US government can keep spending more money than it has. To counter this, the Trump administration (Treasury Department) has been selling shorter term bonds, which have lower interest rates.
The obvious wise course of action for the US government to take in response is to reign in public spending, reduce the national debt. and balance the budget. But our elected officials of both parties can't seem to do that, no matter how severe the consequences may be. They love, love, love to spend money today to get reelected today, instead of spending money today with an eye on our country's long-term financial health.
In the past, The US Treasury sold long-term bonds to lock in lower interest rates for 10, 20, and even 30 years. But reacting to current pressures, the Trump administration is selling short term bonds which must be replaced sooner because they mature sooner. They like the lower rates, but just like an adjustable-rate home loan puts consumers at great risk if interest rates increase, so too with the US Treasury and these short-term bonds.
Treasury could easily sell longer term bonds, but they have to raise the interest rate to attract buyers in the now-diminished, anti-US market. You talk about the benefits of lower interest rates. That's exactly why Treasury is financing the debt with short-term bonds. Lower rates are politically easier to deal with than higher long-term rates. While pleasant in the short term, its' deeply concerning if you look at the big picture.
That concern is shared by a whole lot of people and entities worldwide. This is precisely why the price of gold has skyrocketed in recent months. People worldwide, including foreign central banks, are losing faith in the US dollar. Foreign banks have been buying up gold literally by the ton because they want to be prepared for a US Dollar collapse. Until recently, central banks worldwide were net sellers of gold if they kept any at all. Now days, they are buying and holding tons of it in their vaults.
Pumping money into the economy is inflationary. So is the declining value of the dollar we now see. The inflation trend has been encouraging for the last three years, but I do not expect that to last. The US government is in deep, deep financial trouble, and people don't trust the dollar like they used to for that reason.
On the surface, low inflation and tax cuts and low interest rates all sound good, when each is viewed in isolation. But when viewed in the context of all the other moving parts of the global economy, I trust you can see that the simple questions you ask cannot be effectively answered with a simple yes or no answer.
They can absolutely be politically answered with a yes or no answer, but wise people look beyond that. Wise people are looking now at their gold holdings, personal debt reduction, and other preparations for the declining dollar.
It's not just me saying this. Major investment advisor companies have made recent news by saying the time-honored 60/40 portfolio mix (60% stocks, 40% bonds) needs to change to 60% stocks, 20% gold, 20% bonds. As people heed this advice, and central banks continue to hoard gold, the gold price will rise (not because gold is becoming more valuable, but because the dollar is becoming weaker).
Even at a steady "desirable" 2% inflation rate, Inflation turns strong dollars into weaker dollars. That's bad. Rates above 2% are worse.
Some people are noticing that the amount of money the US government must borrow to fund its deficit spending continues to increase and has reached dangerous levels. To continue to fund the national debt (keep spending money we do not have and pay interest on the money we borrow to continue that), our government (the taxpayers in other words) now pay more in interest interest than we pay to fund the entire Department of Defense. The national debt is now at an all-time high of $38.5 trillion.
If interest rates tick up just a little bit, the amount of additional expense is unimaginable to ordinary people like you and me. I fear we are near a breaking point that will collapse or severely degrade the US dollar, and our purchasing power along with it.
Allow me to elaborate on the inflation thing just a bit. As an employer of people 30-40 years younger than me, I like to educate them about inflation and the dollar decline. I ask them, if you purchased a nice 3 bedroom house for $300,000, and you lived in it a while and it doubled in value to $600,000, are you then able to sell that house and buy a nice 6 bedroom home? They instantly understand what inflation means. Their next 3 bedroom home did not double in price because the asset increased in value. It doubled in price because the dollar declined in value.
I reinforce the lesson by stacking 5 quarters on the table, which represents minimum wage when I entered the workforce. Next to it I stack 56 quarters, representing Florida's minimum wage today. Again, they instantly see how inflation affects their lives.
When I was a young man, has someone told me $14 an hour would be the minimum wage, it would have been impossible to imagine. Just is it is impossible to imagine that minimume wage may be over $150 per hour in the future. Nevertheless, this is exactly what happened, and that was when America was still a strong nation, considered the "A shining city on a hill" (a phrase used by both Regan and Kennedy).
Is runaway inflation bad? Of course it is. But if you're counting on Trump to keep it low, you would be wise to reconsider. He is paving the way for increased inflation rates of historic proportions.
The other questions you asked are answered above.
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Has investing in gold, silver and the stock market helped or hurt the middle class in the past year?
I don't understand what you are asking.
In the past year, the price of gold and silver have gone up. Anyone who bought gold or silver early in the year benefited. Whether someone benefited from investing in the stock market depends on what stocks they bought. Whether anyone in any economic class benefited from investing in 2025 depends on whether they invested or not and what they invested in.
This is obvious for all people in all classes at all times. Is there a point behind your question? Why are you asking this?
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You spelled war criminal wrong.
Like I said. TDS
700 billion in fraud estimated by some. Huge scandal. Wonder if the pro “law and order Left”(lol)are concerned about this apparent illegality going on?
I have come to accept that no matter how much evidence to the contrary Trump produces, there will always be some people who believe Trump is/was a great president. Even as we see prominent MAGA believers (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Green, the QAnon shamon, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, John Kelly, Bill Barr, to name a few) and large numbers of ordinary people changing their minds about Trump, some never will.
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While Trump continues to voice his friction-free Venezuela daydream in public, the Venezuela government has confirmed none of it. Trump can't even produce one US oil company executive who is willing to relocate to Venezuela, let alone a company willing to pour the billions of dollars into the country Trump fantasizes about. There are no US boots on the ground in Venezuela, no US embassy, no US officials in the country interacting with Venezuela government officials.
Trump's invasion of Venezuela and blockade and ship seizures are illegal acts of war that are further isolating the US among nations. His actions are increasing anti-US sentiment worldwide and accelerating the de-dollarization of the global economy ... thereby weakening the power the US has to impose economic sanctions like it so freely did in the past.
For example, the presidents of S. Korea and China just concluded four days of talks and multiple agreements to improve trading relationships between those two countries. This key US ally in the Far East is seeing the writing on the wall and warming to China to protect its own best interests.
Every day, all day, dozens of countries are modifying alliances and developing alternative trading systems to extract themselves from US influence. Them seeing the US conducting unilateral military operations and economic blockades only accelerates these activities. Trump broadcasting his daydreams does more harm than good.
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