Famous Lasts

I was thinking about how if you were to give this past year a letter grade it would be an "I" for Incomplete.  A lot of things have been left dangeling.  But maybe we should be thinking in terms of famous lasts.  Could 2017 be the last year of a roaring economy for instance?  Could be the last year anybody is thinking in terms of how increasing the deficet 1.5 Trillion be a good thing.  Could 2017 be the last year when sexual harrassment was considered acceptable?   Chris Carter on Breakfast with the Beatles is doing famous Beatle lasts.  For instance "From Me to You" is the last single which is credited to Mc Cartney - Lennon instead of the other way around.  "It's going to be a great day" is the last song on "Flaming Pie" we're told.  Donald Trump may be having a lot of lasts in this regard.  He can't be spending 89 days on the golf course in the following year.  There will be too many crises cropping up in North Korea and Syria.   We are told that Trump has a conservative style of playing golf where he takes shorter strokes but he's accurate and hits the ball where he wants to.  They say Trump is perhaps the best golfer we've had as president.  This will be the last year where we will talk about the Trump bull market.  And yet to even get as low as a 1.5 Trillion dollar deficet it presupposes that the economy will continue to grow over the next ten years the way it has grown in the past three or four years.  Otherwise we'd have a 3.5 Trillion dollar deficet from the tax cuts.  You can't suspend the law of gravity in the economy.  We've already had eight and a half years of economic recovery.  Both Bush and and Trump inherited a good economy from Clinton and Obama respectively.  But Obama inhereted a crappy economy from Bush.  Obama had no choice but to have high deficets to stimulate the flailing economy so we didn't go into an even more massive recession.  People talk about a corporate tax cut.  It's pointed out that the effective tax rate now is about 21 percent.  But when they cut the tax rate this time they didn't get rid of a single loop hole.  (So basically all of those commercials we saw about loop holes being closed were lies)  The only loopholes that were closed were legitimate deductions the American people takes like property taxes and college debt and teacher supplies and of course state and local taxes.  Those "loopholes" are closed to us, but not the benefits rich people continue to get.

On a personal basis I think there is an incomplete feeling.  I have gotten little in terms of Christmas or birthday gifts.  I'm another year older today and have officially moved into my late sixties.  I was in my mid fifties when I started these blogs and I had just recently turned fifty when I moved into this board and care place.  I've aged a lot while I was here.  The past few days I've had gastro-intestinal problems.  This has kept me away of going shopping with my brother.  I'm afraid of how much weight I've lost in the past six weeks or so not just from this current illness but from the protracted nearly three week flu illness I had in late November and early December.  I"m not being very creative today so I"ll end this posting now.