You humble me Wexler, sequoia, Dabnasty. I'll try to answer your inquiries as polite as possible.
From my view, the passing of the ACA was the single greatest boon to FIRE....The election of Trump is a threat to the existence of the ACA and, therefore, a direct threat to my FIRE. ....
Most of the folks on the forum are pretty pro-ACA, being able to do the math that self-insuring after age 50 without guaranteed issue of insurance is a huge downside risk to anyone's stache. I wonder how all of the repeal-and-replace supporters here plan on getting insurance without the ACA after FIRE.
I respectively say this is a particularly poor example. The ethics of it in particular rub me the wrong way. I make 4x what my average peer makes. It's possible I make more than any parent at my daughter's school. Every once in awhile on these forums, people share their approximate incomes. I'm not sure where you fit in but I'm a pauper compared to many people on these forums. Attempting FIRE is a pretty bourgeoisie luxury that we can afford. The government does plenty of things to help us bourgeoisie already. I don't consider
another advantage as a benefit. I consider it parasitic.
As per it helping us? I don't know one way or another. Wait a moment well I step away to do some calculations. From a
Forbe's articles I got a
calculator and used it to figure out how much a young adult male my age making my salary would pay in premiums. After financial help, the Bronze plan is 230$ per month.
Multiplying that by 173 gives us 39790$. I'm simulating a young man for ten years choosing to not get insurance if the ACA didn't exist and he didn't have a job that supplied insurance until he was 30. Let's invest that for 20 years at a 6% return after inflation. That's 127K. I'm going to guess that the average cost of insurance for someone 50-65 years without the ACA would be 766/month. (We'd I get this number? I fiddled with the above calculator and assumed if the ACA didn't exist there would be some insurance provider who would insure a 50-year old for 15-years at the rate they'd charge a 60-year old under the ACA.) Times 766/month by 12 months in a year times 15 years to get to medicare age and we come to 137K. Since this is a rough estimation, I'd consider the financial impact (for my American counterpart) a wash.
A lot of assumptions went into the above but considering Trump has not repealed the ACA and has made statements suggesting he'd prefer single payer (a suggestion that if made by a President Hillary Clinton would never occur due to Republican opposition), the premise that FIRE is harder under Trump than Clinton w.r.t. to the ACA is tenuous.
Hillary Clinton would be systematically worst3 in every single area.
Apology for going off on a tangent.
Care to explain? I am truly curious. I am no fan of Hillary. Imo any US president will not pull out of Paris accord. Also I do not think any US president would call white supremacist "some very fine people".
I am not sure how HC or anyone who was running last year can be worst than this.
Trump was, at best, misinformed and at worst a fool pandering to the alt-right & white supremacists. I am of the latter opinion but there is a construction for the former: Trump is an idiot and conflated people who are "pro Keeping Confederate Statues" with the people who organized the Charlottesville Protest.
This is an area I can say that Trump is better at than Hillary. I make the more generalized postulation below in response to Dabnasty. In the world a year ago, large subsections of the conservative movement denounced the alt-right. The #NeverTrump movement and Ben Shapiro being major detractors of it. Later, particularly around the time Robert Spencer did a Nazi salute while shouting "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory" in November, many others joined in renouncing the alt-right. We saw the Alt-Lite/New-Life form (basically the Alt-Right but with an explicitly rejection of White Nationalism), people like the founder of Vice media Gavin McInnes, his Proud Boys and Rebel Media consciously make choices to not associate or intermix with any event related to the Alt-Right.
Now, in this world, because Donald Trump panders to the alt-right,
no one likes them. It is well-understood that the only way someone can agree with the alt-right is if they are racist or ignorant of what the alt-right is. Also, people are starting to notice the violent sects in Antifa. Part of this I credit to Trump. When he threatens Berkeley's funding for letting Antifa have a heckler's veto. When he mentions correctly that some of the counter-protesters in Charlottesville were violent. It raises visibility on the issue.
Now, let's imagine an alternate world, one where Clinton had won. I'd posit that both the Alt-Right and violent groups on the left like BAHM and Antifa wouldn't be facing the scrutiny they are now under. Let's start right. Perhaps Robert Spencer and white nationalists wouldn't have been so brazen in their hatred; ergo less people would have disassociated from them. Let's go left. We know due to recent evidence that the Obaha Administration (not Barrack in particular) was already turning a blind eye to the "alt-left". I'd doubt a President Clinton would have threatened Berkley or condemned their violence (an interview got released a few hours ago with Clinton. Some headlines implies she rejects the notion that antifa is violent but I haven't read the transcript or watched the interview.)
I'm curious as well. I'm also not a huge Hillary fan but I don't know if you say this because you're generally against the democratic platform and the way she has voted in the past or if you believe she is as corrupt as she has been portrayed by certain media outlets.
Trump is a polarizing figure. Even Republicans won't support him. The attempted repeal of the ACA or the heat he got from them is over DACA is an example of this. History and subjective evaluation may prove me wrong but I think he won't really anything that is irreversibly destructive due to this trait.
In other words, he's impotent.Anything extreme Trump wants to do will be mutually blocked by Republicans and Democrats. After many things that happened with President Obaha (ex. conflicts, wall street bailouts, etc...), I don't trust Democrats to feign opposition to a Democratic president. The Republicans have proven their low-quality metal: they're willing to abandon their supposed principals, their base, and Trump to save themselves.
To restate this: if one has to choose between a horrible president that has their hands tied by both parties and a horrible president who will have half of congress on their side, the man with small hands is the better choice in every single measure in my opinion.