The House Republicans have killed the proposed car tax. Congressman Chip Roy blasted the idea and his strident opposition was enough to make other Republicans realize a proposed car tax was a terrible idea.
The Republicans are, to their credit, rushing to get a deal done by Memorial Day. But some things are obvious bad ideas and that was one.
Concurrently, I am starting to wonder if the President is leaving tariffs in place, for now, to pad the calculations for the tax deal. Assume some bump in revenue from the tariffs that can be used as a “pay for” for the tax cuts and then, once the tax cuts are done, kill the tariffs. That will explode the deficit, but it would make the pre-reconciliation math work.
Keeping the tariffs too much longer is going to make things even worse. Yesterday, Peter Navarro went on CNBC and said the economy was fine, but for the tariffs that he promoted.
Sigh.
A lot of the surge Navarro claims shows a good economy is actually a bunch of people and businesses prepping for chaos from the tariffs. Even inside the White House, most people privately realize this is not going well, despite the spin.
If keeping tariffs around to pad the numbers for permanent tax cuts is the strategy, okay, but get the tax cuts done as quickly as possible to get rid of the tariffs so the economy does not slip into a recession.
But at least the car tax is dead.
Ukraine
Ukraine has signed the mineral rights deal with the United States. This is good. The deal does not require Ukraine to reimburse the United States for past military investment but does count future investment as part of an investment fund jointly managed by both sides to rebuild Ukraine.
The deal also gives the United States access to Ukrainian rare earth minerals, lithium, etc. that opens a new site of acquisition that does not involve China. This gives the United States more skin in the game to keep helping Ukraine.
It seems pretty obvious Russia has no intention of stopping the war it started. There is no firm security agreement from the United States as part of the deal, but obviously, that security is implied by the nature of the deal. Here is the Treasury Secretary’s video statement.
Here is notable language from the press release that did not get added to the video statement:
And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.
I do wonder why that was not in the video statement. It is very good and strong language.
Here is notable language from the press release that did not get added to the video statement:
And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.
I do wonder why that was not in the video statement. It is very good and strong language.
