Not only that, but the deficit is a somewhat arbitrary number and in no way as critical as the debt. If we eliminated the deficit and balanced the budget tomorrow we'd still have debt interest payments close to the Reagan defense budgets…and that's with almost zero interest fueled by massive money printing and debt shackled to every US citizen, which obviously can't continue. When interests rise, and they will…a lot…and we throw a few more trillion in debt on top of the fire, we will be in a world of hurt. Both sides will try to put out the fire with more spending (and more debt) which will make things far worse for a long time before they get any better. We have some serious financial chickens that will come home to roost. Oh wait, someone already used that phrase, therefore it must be irrelevant.

The stock market is on steroids from trillions of "free" money floating around for them to gamble with, plus almost infinite malinvestment from the deep pockets that know Uncle Sugar will backstop any and all catestrophic risk from now on as long as its structured to have widespread damage if it isn't. That's a pretty nice system to gamble with taxpayer money. Keep the gains if you win, offlload the losses if you lose. Its ridiculous to use "the stock market" as a barometer of an administration's success, but to be fair if "the other guy" was in there right now his party's fanboys would be pointing to the same metric as proof of success.

I think its a horrible move for us to be blowing billions on short term "return to shareholders" as we will need that money for a rainy day, and it will rain hard eventually. We will deeply regret wasting that much money that ended up doing nothing long term to help us. At least we're paying down debt aggressively, which is critical. That and the refinery plus some of the other decisions (cheaper used AC that are paid for instead of everything having to be new high dollar inventory) will be what may make the difference in the deep trough times we will face. We will be wishing for that 2.5 Billion (and counting) in peak share price buybacks and exponentially increasing short term dividends back but oh well.