Those Who Don't Learn From History ...

are doomed to repeat it.   So let’s take a walk down Economic Memory Lane.  On the day after the end of the Republican-driven shutdown of the Federal government in 2013, the financial services company Standard & Poors estimated that the closure had removed about $24 billion from the economy of the United States.

It’s hard to get one’s head, let alone one’s heart, around such numbers.  To borrow a metaphor from the brilliant novel Daughter of Time, “A thousand people drowned in a flood is news.  A single child drowned in a pond is tragedy.”

Let’s try to bring that $24 billion closer to home.  Such an amount would finance:

1. About nine million five hundred sixty one thousand seven hundred fifty three (9,561,752,88) school lunches
2. Tuition for about one hundred fourteen million two hundred ninety five thousand seven hundred fourteen (114, 295, 714.28)  three-credit courses at Delaware County Community College in southeastern Pennsylvania
3. The resurfacing of about six hundred thirty one thousand five hundred seventy nine (631, 578.94) miles of roadways

Here’s hoping we don’t go through all this again, should the Trump tax plan pass in 2017.

$23K? So What ...

The high point reached today by the Dow - Jones Industrial Average means little or nothing to the working class or to the working poor.

An annual income of $32,718.00 puts a family of four at 133% of the Federal poverty level, and makes that family eligible for SNAP and LIHEAP benefits.  But such income leaves little if anything to invest, since as much as $36,900.can be needed to sustain that family.

Mr. Trump might equate the performance of the stock market with material success overall, but Bodhi doesn't buy it.