“The poorest 10% of households will lose an average of about $1,200 in resources per year, amounting to a 3.1% cut in their income, according to the analysis released Monday of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Households in the highest 10% of incomes will see about a $13,600 boost in resources on average, amounting to a 2.7% increase in their incomes.
Earners in the middle of the distribution will see their annual resources grow by about $800 to $1,200 on average, according to the analysis.”
“To place huge new tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump claimed that those transactions are “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.
It’s a threat that the White House now says it can put off addressing for another 90 days.
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This is not just a rhetorical point but a question that’s central to the legality of the tariffs. In front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last month, the Trump administration’s lawyer told skeptical judges that the president’s tariff powers rested upon the existence of an “unusual threat” that the president was taking action to “deal with.”
The latest delay in the China tariffs, then, seems to directly undermine that claim. If Trump wants to use the threat of tariffs to negotiate a new trade deal with China, fine, but then that’s not an emergency—and, as a result, those tariffs cannot be implemented with the emergency powers the president is currently claiming.”
“Congressional Republicans really like the 2017 Trump tax cuts. It’s why the “big, beautiful bill” costs so much.
The decision to either extend those cuts or make them permanent before their year-end expiration date was the driving force behind the original, $2.4 trillion price tag of the House-passed megabill. Then the Senate GOP went even further, deepening the financial impact of the vast domestic policy package.
That exacerbated the string of intraparty fights that consumed Republicans for weeks. Even as different factions squared off over issues such as slashing Medicaid — hundreds of billions here, tens of billions there — the extension of the 2017 tax cuts had already set the table. In the end, the Senate added another $1 trillion to the price tag.
Detailed final estimates from Congress’ scorekeeper haven’t yet been released, but the overall picture is clear: The cost of President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation was inflated by the desire to extend the tax cuts from his first administration. Other political fights shifted the price tag from there, but there was not much the staunchest deficit hawks could do but chip away at the margins.”
“President Donald Trump and his allies have spent months promising that higher tariffs will usher in a “golden age” of wealth and prosperity for America.
Now, the administration and one of its biggest allies in Congress are pushing for a new round of stimulus checks seemingly aimed at easing the economic pain caused by…yes, those same tariff policies.
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The proposal to send out tariff-funded stimulus checks should at least put an end to two of the more nonsensical claims that the president and his pro-tariff allies have been making. First, this should confirm that Americans—not foreign governments or corporations—are footing the bill for the tariffs.
Second, the idea that tariffs can be used to close the budget deficit should be similarly put to bed. Some estimates suggest that tariffs are likely to widen the deficit (even without any stimulus checks being mailed out), as they will slow economic growth and reduce future tax revenue. Even if you ignore those dynamic projections, there’s a big problem: The $150 billion in tariff revenue collected so far this year can’t be used to pay down the budget deficit if it is first going to be redistributed to Americans in the form of rebate checks.
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If Trump and Hawley want to spare Americans the pain caused by tariffs, there is a much simpler solution here: Get rid of the tariffs.”
“Big American companies are also reporting growing tariff expenses.
Ford said last week it paid $800 million in tariffs in the second quarter and could shell out as much as $3 billion this year. General Motors reported a $1.1 billion tariff hit in the second quarter and said trade friction could cost the automaker $4 billion to $5 billion in 2025.
Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar warned this week that rising tariffs could cost it $1.5 billion this year. And Apple CEO Tim Cook – who was at the White House on Wednesday to announce an additional $100 billion investment in the U.S. — said the company paid $800 million in tariffs in its most recent quarter and faced another $1.1 billion this quarter.
The White House has pointed to the more than $136 billion it has already collected in tariff revenue, as well as agreements from a number of trading partners to lower tariff barriers and invest billions in the U.S., as a sign that Trump’s approach is working.
However, nearly seven months after he took office, there has been no uptick in manufacturing employment, which remains flat at 12.7 million workers. The increased tariff revenue also amounts to slightly more than 7 percent of the $1.9 trillion federal government budget deficit projected in fiscal 2025.
A survey released this week by the National Foreign Trade Council, a business group, found that companies have been increasingly forced to delay or reduce their product and service offerings due to rising costs and sourcing challenges.
The administration has also shown little sympathy for companies complaining of higher tariff costs and supply chain disruptions.”
“With a series of short-sighted tariff maneuvers, the president has effectively told Toyota (and other Japanese carmakers) that it should do more of its manufacturing in Japan and stop trying to create jobs in America.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced a new trade deal with Japan that will include a 15 percent tariff on Japanese goods, including imported cars. The details of the deal remain somewhat vague, but that’s a significant discount compared to the 25 percent tariff the administration has imposed on cars imported from everywhere else.
The reduced tariffs for Japanese cars are significant because of how that provision interacts with the Trump administration’s other trade policies that are aimed at making it more expensive to manufacture cars in the United States. The president has imposed a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum (both of which are essential for automakers) and has slapped a 25 percent tariff on imported cars and car parts. Those tariffs are already dinging the profits of American carmakers—General Motors reportedly lost more than $1 billion in the second quarter of the year—and auto industry experts say they will raise prices, reduce demand for new cars, and generally make American cars less globally competitive.
In short, the Trump administration is offering an incentive to import finished cars from Japan, while making it more expensive to buy the stuff you need to build cars in America.
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Ultimately, the problem here is not the specific tariff rates the Trump administration is seeking to charge on steel, car parts, or cars imported from Japan or Mexico. (Those rates are likely to change anyway, if the past few months of the trade war are any indication.)
No, the real problem here is the Trump administration’s belief that it can use tariffs to shape the global trading system toward contradicting goals with no tradeoffs or distortions. In reality, each new tariff move causes both. The market responds to incentives, and right now, the Trump administration is creating a set of incentives that will raise costs for American manufacturers while driving investors overseas.”
The Japanese trade deal is actually bad for U.S. car companies. Cars manufactured in Japan will have a 15% tariff on them, but cars made in Mexico by U.S. companies will have a 25% tariff, giving U.S. companies a disadvantage. They could move that back to the U.S., but the move itself is costly, and the cost to make the cars in the U.S. is even costlier.
“the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the fate of the Trump tariffs—or clear the way for a huge expansion of executive control over economic affairs. The administration is appealing a May decision from the Court of International Trade (CIT), where judges unanimously sided with a collection of small business owners and state attorneys general who challenged the president’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs on nearly all imports.
At the center of the case is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the 1977 law that the Trump administration used in February to slap tariffs on imports from Canada, China, and Mexico. The Trump administration again invoked IEEPA to impose its so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April, which included a universal 10 percent tariff on all imports and higher, country-specific tariffs, some of which are set to go into effect on August 1 after being delayed several times.
In May, the CIT ruled that Trump had overstepped the authority granted by the emergency powers law. “We do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the president,” the judges said in a unanimous opinion. “We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers.”
The Trump administration appealed that ruling, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit placed a temporary stay on the lower court’s ruling, allowing the tariffs to remain in force until the appeals court has a chance to review the case.”