Financial Samurai: How To Prepare For Trump’s Middle Class Tax Hike

One maid each for two babies and another one to supervise the two. Too common in Asia!

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It’s so obvious that illegal immigration lowers income of the low skilled workers, enrich the business owners, enrich the high income household who uses illegal workers. Many Bay Area household employs the illegal workers to save money on gardening, cleaning and maid etc. If there is no illegal immigration, you would have to pay much higher wage for local workers.

It is not a secret that illegal immigration and trade pact has reduced and limited low end wages. It’s just that political correctness prevents people to speak about it. If I’m a professor, I would not allow my PhD student to publish papers on this. Instead I would encourage my PhD students to publish papers to prove that illegal immigration contributes XYZ dollars to the economy and say nothing about the impact on income inequality.

But this is so obvious that even the “poorly educated” Trump supporters figured out this without the research from Ivy League professors.

If it’s that simple, there will be no need for economics. All those fancy statistical modeling and econometrics should just go to the garbage can.

Trumpsters tend to have naive zero-sum world view. Either I win or I lose. There is no room for win-win.

If that’s the case, why good jobs require visas and no illegal immigrants are allowed to take good jobs?

There are so many foreign engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, government workers and politicians eager to work in USA, why not let them in without the freaking visa quotas and arduous procedures?

The law of supply and demand is well known and even the “poorly educated” understand it, when the highly educated selectedly choose to ignore it.

This is like the SF politics. Many common sense are relegated as nonsense, nonscientific, no academic proof.

But I think that people are not stupid. If all the economists become dead tonight, I’m sure people are still smart enough to live their life.

If you listened to economists and other pundits, you would not have bought houses and become a poor stock investor. Many economists are worse off than you guys, even though they pretend to be expert and pretend to be smart. Many scholars are imposters and they do not know what they talk about.

I think the reason Democrats are losing white working class is exactly this. Those white working class has already given up on mainstream media and left scholars. Many scholars have become politically charged and they can give opposite opinions based on different political need.

So inequality is bad, but everyone being equally middle class is bad too (based on your comments about Iowa). I don’t get what you want.

Inequality is natural and inequality is forever, literally speaking.

Nothing’s equal and everything is unequal.

Income inequality seems most acute in liberal cities. Income is pretty equal in republican cities. The worst income inequality is in illegal immigrant rich liberal cities such as SF.

Democratic Party is the party of inequality. If you calculate the income inequality metrics, Democratic Party will be the above and beyond. On the top, you have billionaires, on the bottom, you have illegal immigrants and welfare receivers. Republicans are much more equal in terms of income distribution. Basically democrats are a party of rich elites using and taking advantage of the bottom income earners.

Why would anyone want to sneak into Canada? The weather is horrible. …

There is no need for economics. It is a BS field pretending to be a science, with people just making crap up. They use math to confuse folks that don’t understand math, and give a false sense of rigor to their snake oil.

If all of the economists disappeared, nothing would change in the world. It is really just a combination of sociology and anthropology, with a sprinkling of grade school mathematics.

If economists actually knew what they were talking about, they’d all be warren buffets, counting their billions.

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I don’t have much respect for Warren Buffet; he is not as smart as what the media portrays him to be, but what can you do, he has a lot of dough.

Democratic Party will be dead if there is no big income or social inequality. Income or social inequality is the butter and bread for the Democratic Party.

If the big income or social inequality disappears, most people will be middle class or above. And these happy people will all become Republicans and try to protect the good life and good society. There will nobody left to support the Democratic Party to push for movements.

To a Democratic Party strategist, it would be wonderful news to make huge income or social inequality. That’s the way to ensure big voter turnout and increase the Democratic population. It would even make sense to manufacture income or social inequality for Democratic Party to obtain power, or at least to make the income or social inequality appear worse than reality.

This was what happened in the former communist countries. They have to create differences, create conflicts, magnify the differences to keep people interested in their political movement.

Illegal immigration is the Democratic Party’s secret to gain an political advantage. Hillary’s mistake is overly confident about the development from decades of illegal immigration. She ignored Bill Clinton’s advice to pay more attention to white voters.

If illegal immigration stops, the Democratic Party will slowly cease to exist and a new centrist party will replace the current Democratic Party, which is composed of immigrants, disadvantaged minorities, and a small number of white opportunists who crave power. Since same sex marriage is already legal, democrats will lose the gay rights whites eventually.

Definitely there are lots of abuse of sciences, especially abuse of social sciences. Much of the social sciences research are BS. Many students and professors do not believe their own research at all. Even worse, many economists and social scientists are used by political powers to make certain political view more credible.

If you read some SF newspaper, it will be enormously obvious. New York Times, Washington Post, even sometimes WSJ, are all political propaganda. I do not think it’s a good idea to ignore people’s common sense and become a slave of fake science, misleading science, or politically tailored science.

Statistics do not lie, but statisticians do.

Economics do not lie, but economists do.

Sometimes an honest 5th grader can make a more correct statement than a political Nobel prize winning economist.

Heck, even a little kid can be smarter than all the pretentious experts regarding the emperor’s new clothes. The secret for the twisted “scientist” or “economists” is to spin, make a simple stuff extremely complicated to convince a “pretentious smartie” so that the “pretentious smart” will believe in the emperor’s new clothes.

Too much inequality is bad, simply because the have-nots will be very unhappy. You can’t have a stable, healthy society when a huge trunk of people are unhappy.

Too little inequality is also bad. China before Deng Xiaoping was very equal. Everyone was equally poor. Thus Deng’s breakthrough comments at the time: it’s OK for a few to get rich first. The assumption is that few rich people will pull up the rest.

So like everything in life, too much and too little are not good.

About Iowa and the Rust Belt in general, are they a happy bunch there? I don’t know. You tell me:

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I have a lot of respect for social science. What they study is really difficult, and hugely relevant. More relevant than the so-called “hard science” like string theory.

No, economics is not about making money in stock market.

Real social sciences is useful. However, real social science is a small percentage of the stuff claimed to be social science.

Most media uses the name of social science to pollute the name of the social science. Since people have no time or ability to read real social science, most of the so-called social science stuff people have access to is garbage, mostly worse than garbage due to political spin.

Hard science graduates: 20% good, 80% dubious
Social science/ economic/ pyschology graduates: 1% good, 99% dubious

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The ones who earn the rights to lecture others are the successful ones :slight_smile:, most of the time just lucky and not due to talents. After reading much of what he said, his advice is targeted at retail investors who normally don’t do due diligence. Also, don’t follow his moves as most of the time, it is appropriate for him but not good for individual investors. Many of his deals is structured such that even if he is wrong, he won’t suffer much losses.

His best advice for retail investors are:

Be greedy when others are fearful, be fearful when others are greedy. Assumption is you did your due diligence and know how to identify extreme greediness and fears.

Purchase at a margin of safety. Assumption is you did your due diligence and know how to compute the fair value.

Your second sentence(highlighted) is worth many times more than the Buffet quote. Warren Buffet’s quote seems so wise because it’s against the common human psychology yet sometimes it is true. The best lie is to tell a half truth. In a lot of times, you need to be fearful when others are fearful, such as in the case of Enron and Lehman brothers. The key is to do enough due diligence to understand the companies.

Look like you’ve been thinking deeply about such things. Agree that it is safer for most people to follow the herd sentiments.

I never followed his moves; I think his advice was BS most of the time, but I know quite a few of my peers who listen to him…:expressionless:

If the climateers are right Trump will fix that :slight_smile: