Thank Obama policies for prosperous 2017

Re “Middle class got some good news in 2017” (Dec. 24): Other than stock prices, any good economic news in 2017 accrues to the momentum of Obama-era policies, not cuts in regulations or taxes that haven’t set in yet.

Old rubric about corporate income taxes was corporations don’t pay them, consumers do. So one test for AT&T will be if it now lowers prices. Its rate for my cable/land line just went up, so I’m a skeptic.

American companies were already sitting on a $2.3 trillion cash hoard. Hard to see how giving them more cash will set off a frenzy of new investing. I do hear spending on robotics is up, which won’t help the middle class long term. And what ever happened to paying for tax cuts by closing corporate loopholes?

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The proof is in next year’s pudding.

Bob Schmidt

La Jolla

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Burt Smith (“Trump’s first year shows he’s winning” Dec. 24) cites “facts in a nutshell” in praising Trump’s 3.3 percent economic growth and Barack Obama’s was never higher than 1.4 percent. Not so. Except for 2009, the first year of the Obama administration, where GDP shrunk by 2.8%, continuing the economic slide from the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration’s annual GDP growth averaged 2.1 percent and never was lower than 1.6 percent.

Smith also writes, “…manufacturing jobs surging with sector unemployment at 2.6 percent”, but Trump inherited a manufacturing unemployment rate of 3.9 percent when he was elected.

Actually, overall job growth under President Trump from February to August of this year (1,189,000 jobs) lags the number of jobs created under the Obama administration for the same period in 2016 (1,422,000 jobs).

Trump may not get enough credit for the economy’s performance, but he continues to argue that he hit a home run when, in reality, he started out at third base.

John Hayes

Bankers Hill

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