Up And Down Wall Street

I have a serious love-hate relationship with Wall Street. If you want to make any real money for retirement or even just quality of life, you have to engage with The Market. You can do so without a ton of risk if you choose your investments wisely. When politics adversely affect The Market, I want to pull my hair out!

Stocks took a big dump today because Conservative investors are worried that if Trump can't get his Healthcare Bill rammed through, a lot of his pro-business agenda will be DOA as well. By "pro-business", they of course mean "deregulation" which, in the long run, is *bad* for business and consumers. The other part of his "pro-business agenda" is infrastructure spending...the day Trump proposes any *real* spending on honest-to-goodness Infrastructure, you'll find me stacking snowballs in Hades.

Another thing Wall Street is ignoring is the bill Trump is pushing will be devastating to many his white working-class voters who believed Trump when he promised *everyone* would be covered under his replacement plan. The Congressional Budget Office says 24 million will lose coverage -- and they won't be the rich or the upper middle class, but Trump's biggest base of support. The only way the bill can pass is to continue to lie about Obamacare (that it's in a death spiral) and about its replacement being much better for white working class voters (which is also not true).

What the Right forgets about the ACA is of course that "Obamacare" is in reality a conservative plan proposed long ago by conservatives like Mitt Romney who wanted a market-based alternative to single-payer. But since it was passed by Democrats without a single GOP vote it must be repealed. That's been the true goal of the GOP all along regardless of its effects on the working class and poor. Medicaid also gets a hatchet job in the bill. The trick now is to not let this base know he's betraying them, but they're obviously not paying close attention.

Interesting times...