Are You Smart Money?

If you’re an investor, well worth the read (thanks, Pete): Smart Money And Dumb Money Are Moving In Opposite Directions. The smart money is heavily in cash.

(And if you have time, William O. Cohan, writing in Vanity Fair, says “the Bond King” is worried, too.)

One reason the market is high, some believe, is its expectation of a “massive” tax cut on corporate profits and wealthy investors — both of which make stock ownership more appealing.

That this is exactly the wrong time for a tax cut — 4.2 unemployment; National Debt that needs to shrink relative to the economy as a whole; infrastructure in woeful need of revitalization — is the stuff of another post.

And that “relief for the wealthy” — the lion’s share of what’s being proposed — is clearly not what most Americans would prioritize as a key concern is so obvious as to need no elaboration.

(But when has that ever stopped me?  Most would place a higher priority on lowering health care deductibles and co-pays; putting people to work modernizing infrastructure; allowing federal-student-loan holders to refinance at today’s low rates; funding scientific research.)

But — if the Republicans get their way — here we go again.  Bush promised a massive tax cut “by far the vast majority” of which would go to people “at the bottom of the economic ladder.”  This was a multi-trillion lie.  Plain and simple.

What’s more, it did not trickle down.  It did not create employment gains or wage hikes — employment and wage growth were largely stagnant under Bush; only inequality rose.

Now the Republicans are out to do it again.  A supposedly massive tax cut for average Americans that will in fact be, instead, a massive tax cut — again — for the wealthiest Americans.

(For many Americans, it is the Social Security and Medicare deductions from their paychecks — which will not be cut a dime — that are the main federal tax they pay.)

And you know what they say: “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice . . .”