Trump is now the President Elect, and there has been a very positive impact on the financial markets with nothing actually having been done yet.
The President-elect, congress, state and local politicians will participate in a new political and philosophical landscape in the near term, but neither politicians nor establishment big business will help create true, positive change. That will be up to you and me. Also, there are a lot of people in America trying to help on many fronts. Some have been successful and many have just spun their wheels. (In future posts, I will address a better way to help). However, I don't want to belittle the effect the President Elect or past presidents have had on our country. They typically set the macro, overarching societal, cultural, political and economic tone for America.
So lets get right down to it. What's next? If anyone had asked me prior to the election, what would be the best wholesale changes that could be made to help improve the backdrop for the specific issues and problems that we face, I would have said the following: lower corporate tax rates, lower individual tax rates, and thoughtfully but significantly reduce regulations across many fronts. Another item: address the healthcare system/crisis in America by specifically modifying Obamacare. There are more dials to adjust, but these are the obvious ones. The bottom line is to roll back the overwhelming federal, state, county, and local governmental influence over our lives. It has become absolutely stifling. It is literally choking off the lifeblood of what drives American excellence-entrepreneurship and fair, free market enterprise. Now, you may say to me that all we are doing is giving more power back to Wall Street and to established corporate America. But I would say that a more robust and healthy growing economy would be a much better backdrop in order to engage in both addressing and fixing the American issues and problems. These critical issues are currently, and for the past 50 years have been, swept under the rug or barely addressed. And if they were looked at closely, it was to advance someone else's agenda, not to truly fix or address the issue or problem. After the above tax and regulation moves (and it appears President Elect Trump is determined to do the above items), the real fun begins.
A position of economic and financial strength (which hopefully the US will find itself in a year or two) will be the best backdrop for driving positive change. It is much harder to achieve positive change in an anemic economy (what we have had in the US over the past 8 years). Interestingly, the best backdrop for true change is complete economic collapse but we missed that window in 2008-2010. It's too painful and frightening for a society to look down that hole.
