The whole tax reform think kinda changes the bar that one measures against.
This falls into the category of changes that feel big right now, but in reality will not do much to change the tides in the long run. Like QE... Like Housing... Like Tech... etc... Plenty of tax reform and major changes have happened in the last 150 years that haven't done much to budge that math. That is, with a decade long view tax reform seems significant and we see a short term kick from the market, but it'll regress to where it should be over time and 40 years from now you won't see it had much, if any, impact on the long term movement of the market.
This thinking, that something today is going to make huge changes tomorrow, it's a very human thing we do (evolved to add significance to short term things - like a lion jumping out of a bush, *phew* it grabbed someone else and not me), with market performance, to extrapolate current trends (I'll call it short term changes) into longer term impacts on the market (not sleeping for a few days worried a lion will jump out again). That is, we are wired to believe short term things will impact our long term safety - this has served us well as a species, but can really cause havoc with investing. Often the term people use is "this time it's different because...". Reality is, that in the long run, it just follows this linear growth when you zoom out far enough. To hammer that point home, for the last 146 years, every 40 year rolling period (there are 107 of them) has fallen between 6.9% and 7.4% - real rate of return (inflation adjusted).
The analogy of the ocean is a good one here. Putting up levies and walls will do nothing to change the ocean from doing what it eventually wants to do. I'm no expert though, I just enjoy making sense of this stuff -- and from all the books I've read, and in the time I've spent analyzing long term trends in the market, the more value I see in this. I will caveat this with... the older I get, the less significant 40 year tends become, to me.
