"Jim in CT detbuch clearly dont understand Empirical evidence its clear data points exist for 8 years under Obama"

I keep saying I give Obama some credit for helping to get the economy chugging again. Is that going too fast for you? Do you need me to sing it for you? Believe me, you don't want that.

You keep saying that under Trump, it's the rich that are benefitting more. I agree the rich benefit more. I keep asking you, didn't the rich benefit more when the stock market surged during the Obama years? Did Obama pass a law saying that the wealthy couldn't buy stocks, in order to prevent them from disproportionately benefitting from the market surge?

When the economy grows, the wealthy benefit more. Simple arithmetic guarantees that will happen, because they have a lot more to invest. You cannot stop that, and I don't see why you'd want to.

WDMSO, does it help anyone, if the wealthy don't get wealthier? That's the only question that matters if your beef is income inequality. If the wealthy all decide to stop working and stop investing, how is anyone better off?

"They are no such long term data points for Trump regarding his overall impact in the economy"

It's been a year. That's not exactly a meaningless time horizon. No one is calling for a recession anytime soon. The market has been booming since 09, so we are due for a pullback, regardless of which party I sin charge. Not many financial planners are calling for that.

Here's another question. Which party ran Congress (where laws and budgets are passed) for the last 6 years of Obama's 8 years?

" am not suggesting Trumps hasn't had an impact on the US economy(its effect are founded only on speculation) "

Wrong. It's not pure speculation. We know what the stock market is doing, we know what's happening with black unemployment and home ownership. We have empirical data to measure those things.

As to the impact of the tax overhaul, that is mostly speculative. But most fair-minded financial professionals will concede that the economy is doing well in general, because it perceives that there is a very business-friendly person in the Oval Office. There wasn't really any specific policy that was enacted until the tax overhaul. But there has been optimism that Trump would be business-friendly. That optimism, matters.

"we'll see in the coming years how it shakes out "

True. But as I said, a year isn't a worthless sample size. if the market tanked in the first year, do you expect anyone to believe that you'd be saying "hey, it's only been a year, we need to give Trump time before we can judge him"? .

we can go into a recession that isn't necessarily Trump's fault. Some things, probably many things, are beyond the control of the feds. Maybe the best Trump can do is make a recession les severe than it otherwise would be.

If Obama was POTUS in 2017, I am confident the economy would still have improved. I don't think it would have improved as much. All I can base that on, is my speculation that the optimism that the market clearly feels, at having a rabidly pro-business POTUS. The economy likes having him as POTUS. I'm not sure that can be denied.

Finally something we can all agree on. He's rabid.
:D

The economy likes having him as POTUS. I'm not sure that can be denied.

I agree in the short term .but only time will tell how much the economy will like him

A great deal of the current business optimism has been created by his policies. The empirical evidence is that the greater optimism and more expansive forecasts occurred after his promises were made and policies began being put into place as evidence that the promises would be kept. The time period may be too short for you (one year instead of four) but evidence gathered from observation does not require a specific period of time (e.g., not too long as in not more than eight years, and not too short as in more than one year) to be empirical. Time may produce more evidence. But, in the immediate now, the evidence, for the time being, is in.

And your use of the "time machine" contradicts itself and other things you've said. As in when I proposed that if past administrations had reduced the corporate tax rates over the past 24 years, the Federal government, during that period, would have collected hundreds of millions, even trillions of revenue more than they got with the high tax rates, you rejected that as being in the past, that I was in my time machine again. Yet you then went on your own time machine into the future, the gathering of "hard data" that will have occurred after Trump's first term is over, to be compared to the past time machine of Obama's eight years and the "hard data" it produced.

First, the data is softer than you portray. The data gets "interpreted" by politically opposing reporters. We're still arguing about the data from the Reagan years or the Kennedy years or the Roosevelt years, and all the data before, in between and after them.

Nor, as in my "what if" conjecture about economic decisions that could have been made in the past, is your sally forth into the future an actual future that is assured to happen. We don't know if Trump will survive the through the rest of this year. We don't know if some cataclysmic event or war will happen. And all of the data that is gathered will be subject to interpretation and will not confirm anything for those who wish it not to. You validate your time machine conjecture merely by expressing it. And pooh-pooh mine, again, merely by saying so.

So far, human nature has not changed since antiquity. And you don't get to limit how far back or how far into the future one may go to find evidence or to speculate on how humans will act under given circumstances. You certainly cannot dismiss how they acted under those circumstances in the past as being too long ago to matter. At least, not without "hard data" to suggest they would act differently today than in the past under the same circumstances.