While I agree with your sober analysis Irv, I still don’t understand, or refuse to understand, how people can vote against their own economic self-interests, never mind the blatant corruption, racism and loonieness coming out from this current administration.
I can completely understand an upper middle class or rich family, making more than $300K a year, voting Republican. That’s just common sense. But how a working class or middle-class family will vote for them just mystifies me, since they or their children won’t benefit from it now or in the long run. I guess they unrealistically believe that they too one day will join those ranks, like those people who buy a weekly Power Ball ticket hoping to win millions, even though the odds are higher than being struck by lightning.
I too have benefited from my investments in the stock market, different mutual funds and bonds but I have this gnawing feeling it’s all short-sighted and these boom or bust swings in the economy will in the long run do more harm than good for future generations. Warren Buffett has said so himself, as well as the late John C. Bogle of Vanguard, both of who I admire greatly.
I've posted this analysis before, but I can't find the post via a search, so I'll summarize it again. Trump's loyal base is about a third of the electorate. Other people with an economic interest in Republican tax and property policies include small business owners, of which there are millions. Landlords, there are millions too. There are probably a million people with 401K balances over $1M. Fidelity investments alone manages about 200,000 such accounts. IRA accounts over $1M are probably more than another million. The number of 401K and IRA accounts between $250K and $1M are almost certainly in the millions. And there's a multiplier effect by at least 2x for married couples who tend to vote alike. There are a lot of people, IMO, with a vested economic interest who may close their eyes to Trump's behavioral ugliness to vote against the progressive agenda. And just thinking about it, I'll add in anyone who works for the fossil fuel energy industries, the airlines, power companies, and probably anyone else who would be economically inconvenienced by The New Green Deal.
BTW, an annual income of $300K puts you in the top 5% of wage earners. You're not "upper middle class".
So I think there are potentially many millions of voters who may be silent Trump voters, and I also think these people are more likely to actually vote than left-leaning people.
It seems to me that the day of American corporations plowing back their profits into their company, investing in R&D, instead of acquiring and over paying for smaller companies who’ve done the heavy lifting, for slow but steady growth, and staying ahead of the competition with their own in-house R&D, like Western Electric/Bell Labs did, is a thing of the past. And don't get me started on what we pay the head of these corporations, profitable or not. It's just obscene.
Look no further than Microsoft after Bill Gates, Google and Apple, etc. Unlike Jeff Bezos & Amazon who insists on keeping almost everything in-house whenever possible and has shown steady but slow-growth from day one and shareholders are a secondary consideration.
Instead the emphasis nowadays is on meeting unrealistic quarterly dividends and the impatient quick-buck shareholder who, if you think about it, has no interest in the economic long-term health of the company.
I think you have some misconceptions about how US product companies work. Just for starters, Amazon and Google do not pay dividends, and never have. Microsoft and Apple pay small dividends. Amazon does not always grow products from within either, they often acquire other companies for their technology. As does Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Nvidia and just about every other big technology company. For example, some of Amazon's AWS products or technologies are based on external investments or acquisitions. Their latest ARM-based CPU and networking technologies are developed by an Israeli company they acquired called Annapurna. The Redshift data warehousing software came from a company Amazon invested in called ParAccel. Some technologies are developed in-house, but some aren't. Other Amazon technology acquisitions I can think of include Elemental Technologies, E8, and Zoox.
The model of investing in start-ups and later doing acquisitions is seen as a way to fund diverse innovation without big-company processes and oversight. Having been in big technology companies, a start-up, and corporate labs, any of these models can work, and, as with all innovation, a lot of initiatives fail no matter where they start. I, for one, do not look back at the Bell Labs model romantically at all, and I was tangentially associated with them when the company I worked for was acquired by AT&T. More recently I was hired into a big corporate labs organization, and I don't look back at that experience in a positive manner either. Depending only on in-house innovation is not a model that keeps you at the forefront of the industry. Even old-line companies know this. GM acquired a start-up called Cruise for self-driving technology, and now GM's implementation is considered by Consumer Reports to be the best in the industry, surpassing Tesla:
In this review of driving assistance systems from a range of automakers, Consumer Reports says Cadillac's Super Cruise outperforms other car companies' systems.
www.consumerreports.org
I know it's romantic to think about Bells Labs and the transistor or Unix, but the reality is that internal labs are often slow, ponderous, and highly political. Companies use the external investment model because oftentimes it works best. To paraphrase Andy Grove, only the open-minded and nimble survive.
