That's the primary purpose of the Keystone pipeline, send the heavy sour Canadian tar sand crude to the docks by the refineries so it can be put on ships and sailed to the refineries where it can be best processed. There is some capacity for sour crude refining in Houston but most are setup to crack sweet crude.

pay band with the 350 and I’m in!

This is not reality. The last four years were most significantly impacted by what happened in 2020-COVID. An unprecedented number of senior pilots left Delta followed by unprecedented hiring, both are exclusive of who was running the administration. The salaries of all major airline pilots have been baked into the cake for decades; again, independent of administration. Your salary increases because it is contractual. That has been accellerated recently as a result of tumult caused by COVID.

At Delta, a primary driver to the increase of anyones 401K in a MUTUAL FUND were company contributions, not return on investment. Not sure who you include in your generalization of "most" people, are these people who have upgraded to captain? Did they move from a regional to mainline? A significant change in salaray has been the result of a significant change of position independant of who is running the government.

A hope of perpetual returns in the stock market of anything other than the average historical norm of 10 percent 'ish is baseless strawman.

Everyone hopes the future is better. The fact is that it will be both, better and worse.

I think we’re kind of talking past each other. I’m not claiming what happened the last four years was because of whoever was in charge. A series of events unfolded where we got massive seniority boost, massive pay raises, and massive stock market returns. I don’t think pointing out how the market has done the last 4 years is a strawman, as everyone clings to that as an argument whenever their candidate is in charge.

All this flies in the face of the argument that “thank God ______ got elected, now things can start to get a lot better"

My point is the last four years have been a golden age of prosperity and advancement for legacy airline pilots that is unlikely to be even close to replicated regardless of who is in charge.

Even this seems extremely dubious, especially in real terms

I think since inspection the S&P is historically at 7%. But with the dividend yield of 1.5-2% reinvested it kind of acts as a hedge against inflation long term.

it is indeed, but assuming infinite growth is hard to reconcile with reality.

i am not sure forcing investment with 401ks will yield infinite growth forever. large numbers catch up to us all

i generally agree with you except on one point that applies to us who operate under the RLA:

he who controls the executive branch also controls the NMB.

With that in mind, good luck to us on our upcoming Section 6. I’ll be lol’ing at all the flight deck consternation.

You’re living in a fantasy world. 3 weeks after the election, the S&P 500 is at 5969. On Election Day, it closed at 5782. That’s barely up 3%. A little short term pop for sure, but I don’t expect a 1% a week increase to continue going forward. Certainly not massive amounts of newly minted millionaires.

Also looking at the last 4 presidential terms (using Election Day to Election Day):

From Election 2020 to 2024, the S&P was up 77%.
From Election 2016 to 2020, the S&P was up 57%
From Election 2012 to 2016, the S&P was up 48%.
From Election 2008 to 2012, the S&P was up 55%.

Oh, and both Election 2000-2004 and Election 2004-2008 were both negative!

Draw your own conclusions, but Biden, Trump, and Obama all oversaw roughly equal periods of stock market growth.

S&P 500 Index Funds FTW!

But seriously, anyone who thinks the POTUS has much if any effect on the stock market, gas prices, price of eggs, etc etc in the short term is a partisan hack. Economic policies set by one administration generally have effects down the line. Deregulation of the banking industry took a long time before it caused the '08 recession.