President Donald Trump just added complications to the Republican tax-reform debate. The president on Monday called for major changes to the tax plans currently working their way through Congress. In a tweet sent while he was in Asia, Trump said he is “proud” of lawmakers for getting “close” to approving a tax bill but added […]
Category: Personal Finance
Trump’s Tax Plan To Cost Middle Families More
Republicans are understandably nervous about the political position they’ve found themselves in. A year after an election that vaulted them to total dominance over the levers of federal power, GOP officials have effectively nothing to show for their efforts; Donald Trump is the least popular first-year president of the polling era; the Russia scandal is […]
Social Security Benefits To See 2% Increase
Millions of Social Security recipients and other retirees will get a 2 percent increase in benefits next year. It’s the largest increase since 2012 but comes to only $25 a month for the average beneficiary. The Social Security Administration announced the cost–of-living increase Friday. The COLA affects benefits for more than 70 million U.S. residents, […]
Trump Team Says No Guarantee That Middle Class Taxes Won’t Rise
President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, said today that he can’t guarantee that taxes won’t go up for some middle-class families under the administration’s sweeping tax overhaul. “There’s an exception to every rule,” Cohn told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “Good Morning America.” “I can’t guarantee anything,” said […]
Wells Fargo Created 1.4 Million More Fake Accounts Than Previously Reported
Wells Fargo on Thursday said it had potentially opened an additional 1.4 million sham accounts customers didn’t want, 67 percent more than it initially estimated, escalating an already contentious battle over the future of the mega bank. The bank revised the total, now up to 3.5 million, after discovering that employees may have been opening […]
Trump Has At Least $315 Million In Liabilities… Not Worth $10B He Claimed
WASHINGTON President Donald Trump had personal liabilities of at least $315.6 million to German, U.S. and other lenders as of mid-2017, according to a federal financial disclosure form released late on Friday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. He had roughly $20 million in income from his new marquee Washington hotel, which opened just […]
Trump Budget Has Huge $2 Trillion Dollar Math Error
“A New Foundation for American Greatness” was built on quicksand, and the president’s defenders are happy to keep shoveling it. President Donald Trump’s newly unveiled budget contains a massive accounting error that uses the same money twice for two different purposes. Based on its supersized projections of 3 percent GDP, the president’s budget forecasts about […]
Trump Tax Plan Sent Back To Drawing Board
Before the election, Trump inked a “contract with the American voter” saying he’d work with Congress to present an ambitious tax reform plan within the first 100 days of his presidency. In early February he told a roomful of CEOs that his administration would be announcing something “phenomenal in terms of tax” within two to three weeks. Then […]
Social Security Needs To Be Fixed Not Left Alone
Despite proposing major spending cuts to most domestic agencies, President Trump’s “skinny budget” spares the Social Security Administration. Thankfully, the president is living up to his campaign pledge to protect the program that serves 61 million Americans. Yet, without any action by Congress to reform the system, benefits will be cut anyway, by at least […]
Automation Pushing America To Universal Basic Income For It’s Citizens
Is a guaranteed paycheck from the government, with no strings attached, the answer to the relentless rise of automation? The concept might sound far-fetched, but a so-called universal basic income (UBI), is currently one of the most hotly debated policy topics being floated as a means to address income inequality and the disruption that technology […]
2 Easy Fixes For A Common Social Security Problem
Feel like you need to take a mulligan on your Social Security strategy? More than one-third of retirees decide to claim their benefits as soon as they can, at age 62. Retirees may have good reason to be worried. The program’s trust fund is projected to run out of money in 2030, meaning there won’t […]
Trump Budget Nominee Supports Cutting Medicare, Social Security
President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s budget director, Rep. Mick Mulvaney , R-S.C., defended Tuesday his support of cuts to popular entitlement programs that Trump vowed to keep intact and emphasized that he would bring a “fact-based approach” to the role. In appearances before the Senate budget and homeland security committees, Mulvaney acknowledged […]