Helping you make better long-term investment decisions...

Owning consumer staples stocks is an absolute must in a dividend investing strategy.

Most people turn to dividend stocks for two reasons—to generate income or to put the magic of compounding to work using dividend reinvestment to amplify wealth building over time.

It’s Labor Day weekend, and my goal with this letter will be to not interrupt your long weekend too much. But there are some things that are happening that are important. My basic thesis for quite some time has been that we are in a Muddle Through Economy, which I’ve always meant that to me the GDP will grow slightly south of 2% over time. For 25 years, that has been the case. Is it time to revisit the Muddle Through world? Let’s look at some of the data and try to get a feel for what the next few months and even quarters looks like.

For the past six weeks, we’ve walked through the forces creating America’s K-shaped economy, housing, healthcare, education, wages, incentives, and the political consequences when enough people decide the system is not working for them.

Stalemate is not an option. The costs will be felt.

Albert wrote in this week about a problem that can sometimes plague your investments. His email started, “Sometimes I like something that is too complicated for me to handle the taxes.”

Last week we looked at the water and the wires. This week we take on the objection that scares people most: that AI, and the data centers that run it, are coming for their jobs. This one is different from the water and power arguments, because it isn't really a factual dispute so much as a forecast, and forecasts about technology and employment have a long, undistinguished history of being wrong in both directions. So, let's separate what people currently believe from what the data currently shows, and then talk about why the jobs argument, even where it has merit, points toward building more data centers rather than fewer.