“Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” includes a gift to millions of families: $1,000 in an investment account for every eligible newborn.
The new savings vehicles, akin to Individual Retirement Accounts, are designated for children who are U.S. citizens born from 2025 through 2028. In addition to the one-time government contribution, parents and others can chip in as much as $5,000 a year to the accounts, which beneficiaries can access at 18, with some constraints.
The seed money is a boon for recipients and will grow tax-deferred. Financial planners say parents and guardians might do better putting their money into existing investment vehicles such as a 529 plan, a savings plan designed to cover college expenses. But 529s are limited to education, while backers say the new accounts can help their recipients beyond college.
Republican lawmakers call the accounts “Trump accounts,” though the Senate’s plan to officially name them after the president did not make it to the final version of the legislation, which was signed Friday. They deliver on an idea that both Democrats and Republicans have floated for years: to invest money for all children at birth.
Withdrawals from a 529 are not subject to state or federal taxes as long as the funds go toward qualified education expenses – a feature the new investment accounts don’t share. And in the new accounts, parents’ deposits don’t qualify for a tax deduction, notes Greg Leiserson, a senior fellow at the Tax Law Center at New York University. “You have this very slight or minimal-to-nonexistent tax benefit,” he said. “What is the point here?”
Financial adviser Amy Spalding of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said she will continue to steer her clients to 529s. “It’s better from a tax standpoint,” Spalding said. “And there are more investment options. And then there’s a higher contribution limit.” (For 2025, a single person can deposit as much as $19,000 a year into a beneficiary’s 529, while married couples can contribute as much $38,000.)
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withdrawals will be taxed at typical income rates, not at the capital gains rate of a taxable brokerage account. “For most people, this is going to be worse than what they could do in a taxable account,” he said.
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The law requires the new investment accounts to track a U.S. stock index
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“If you’re saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to start school in the fall’ – if the market falls over the summer, the planning you were doing about how you were going to pay for college is totally messed up, because the money you thought would be there, isn’t.”
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account holders cannot touch the funds until they turn 18. After that, the rules are the same as those of an individual retirement account – withdrawals are taxed like income, plus an additional 10 percent tax penalty on any withdrawals before age 59½ except for certain qualified uses.
Those uses include paying for college, supporting themselves if they become disabled, or recovering from domestic abuse or a natural disaster. Beneficiaries also can withdraw as much as $10,000 to buy their first home, and up to $5,000 when they have a new baby themselves.
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Even one of the Trump accounts’ biggest proponents in Congress, Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah), said in an interview that for many parents, the new account design offers more benefits for retirement than for college expenses.”
“Asked whether the U.S. would be flexible with any countries about on the July 9 deadline, Trump said, “Not really.”
“They’ll start to pay on Aug. 1,” he added. “The money will start to come into the United States on Aug. 1, OK, in pretty much all cases.”
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Tariffs are paid by importers — which can pass on part or all of the costs to consumers — and not necessarily by entities in the goods’ country of origin.”
“the bill does not include a provision to eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits.
“There is no provision in the budget bill that directly ‘eliminates’ or even reduces taxes on Social Security benefits,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, told the Washington Post.
Trump’s bill offers a tax deduction of $6,000 to seniors making up to $75,000 individually, or $150,000 on a joint return. The deduction is lowered for incomes above that level and axed for seniors with individual incomes of more than $175,000, or $250,000 jointly. However, the new deduction for seniors is set to expire within a couple of years. The median income for seniors in 2022 was about $30,000.”
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“Before the megabill’s passing, 64 percent of seniors receiving Social Security income paid no tax on their Social Security due to exemptions and deductions, according to an estimate by Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Under Trump’s megabill, 88 percent won’t be paying.”
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the rise is due to the bill’s increase in “the standard deduction for seniors, which, as a result, reduces the number of seniors who will pay taxes on their Social Security benefits.”
…the new legislation will provide limited benefits for lower-income seniors because they already pay less in taxes.”
People are dying because they are not getting medicines that U.S. Aid used to bring them. Many of these medicines were already donated, but they go expired because U.S. Aid, who would be delivering them, was gutted by Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE.
“Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’ shocking retirement announcement Sunday reflects the real state of our politics, an example of how even the most competitive and best known swing states — places like North Carolina, that determine the presidency every four years — are infected by the same contagion as the most hardened one-party states. Amid our hyper-nationalized, hyper-polarized politics, any lawmaker seen as a moderate won’t last long, no matter what state they hail from.”
Tillis did not blindly support Trump; Trumped publicly attacked him and said he was looking for someone to replace Tillis; Tillis announced his retirement.
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“Purple state status doesn’t mean that the citizens are, by and large, more moderate than they are in other states, but rather than on average they resemble something approaching moderation. The truth is that purple states have very few purple voters; they simply have blue and red voters in roughly equal numbers.
In today’s nationalized political environment, those red and blue voters in purple states respond in the same uncompromising way to modern politics as they do in states dominated by the Democratic or Republican parties.”
“The term “axis,” however, suggests that all four powers have a unified view of what they want the global order to look like and have a grand plan to get there. It sounds mischievous and conspiratorial, and it’s most certainly inaccurate. What’s occurring is less a strong, cohesive grouping bounded by ideology and long-term considerations and more a collection of bilateral relationships whose interests sometimes converge — until they don’t.”
“Tehran has suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian announced Wednesday, according to state media reports.
The move marks a significant stepback in Iran’s international cooperation after Washington’s dramatic June 21 strikes on its nuclear enrichment facilities.”
“Since Rubio took over the NSC, he has shrunk its staff by more than half. It now has fewer than 100 people, according to a person familiar with the NSC process. Arguably more importantly, Rubio has imposed changes to what’s called “the interagency process” — a key function of the NSC that involves coordinating policy and messaging across government agencies and departments.
That process, two people told me, is now one in which important meetings aren’t held, career staffers are often in the dark about what’s expected of them and some people or their institutions try to take advantage of power vacuums. I granted many of those I spoke to anonymity to discuss internal administration dynamics.
Some U.S. diplomats and other national security professionals are worried that the current structure means small crises will explode into big ones because they don’t get early attention, and that key officials who deal with priority issues, such as Ukraine, are being iced out of important conversations.
One of the people familiar with the AUKUS situation said the broken process was already fueling turf fights, such as with Colby, a man known for challenging status quo thinking.
“It’s Game of Thrones politics over there,” the person said.”
“”In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”
In the vast agricultural lands north of Los Angeles, stretching from Ventura County into the state’s central valley, two farmers, two field supervisors and four immigrant farmworkers told Reuters this month that the ICE raids have led a majority of workers to stop showing up.
That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time, they said.
One Mexican farm supervisor, who asked not to be named, was overseeing a field being prepared for planting strawberries last week. Usually he would have 300 workers, he said. On this day he had just 80. Another supervisor at a different farm said he usually has 80 workers in a field, but today just 17.
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“Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said an estimated 80% of farmworkers in the U.S. were foreign-born, with nearly half of them in the country illegally. Losing them will cause price hikes for consumers, he said.
“This is bad for supply chains, bad for the agricultural industry,” Holtz-Eakin said.
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Trump conceded in a post on his Truth Social account this month that ICE raids on farm workers – and also hotel workers – were “taking very good, long-time workers away” from those sectors, “with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Trump later told reporters, “Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers.” He added, “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great.”
He pledged to issue an order to address the impact, but no policy change has yet been enacted.
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ICE operations in California’s farmland were scaring even those who are authorized, said Greg Tesch, who runs a farm in central California.