Kevin O'Leary rails against ‘anti-American' GOP tax plan: ‘It's gotta get fixed'
One popular investor and entrepreneur has aired his grievances with the proposed tax plan in President Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill.'
'This is anti-American. It's against small business. I've never seen anything like it. You want to talk about [a] big, beautiful bill? This is a big, ugly piece of that bill. It's gotta get fixed,' Kevin O'Leary said Tuesday on 'Varney & Co.'
'For small business[es], I'm their advocate,' he added. 'So I read all these bills.'
The Trump White House did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment at the time of publication.
The O'Leary Ventures chairman put the onus on the end of the pandemic-era Employee Retention Credit (ERC), which gave government money to businesses that kept Americans employed throughout COVID.
'That program's over. They want to give new powers to the IRS to audit all those small businesses for up to nine years. That's unprecedented. Why would we want to do that to small business?' he posited.
'So many of these audits would occur after the period where they don't have their records,' O'Leary expanded. 'This is war on small business.'
Kevin O'Leary claimed that GOP's proposed tax plan is 'anti-American' and would hurt small businesses.
Photo byHouse Republicans released a portion of Trump's tax agenda late on Friday evening, bringing them one step closer to completing the commander-in-chief's federal budget proposal.
The legislation draft includes an increased child tax credit (CTC), a higher threshold for estate tax liability and codifying the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The full legislation is expected to advance through the Ways & Means Committee this week before reaching the president's desk by July 4.
Notably absent from the rough draft was legislation around state and local tax (SALT) deduction caps, a new millionaires' tax bracket, eliminating taxes on tips, overtime wages and Social Security checks for retirees.
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking to reporters at the Capitol amid negotiations over the GOP's budget bill on May 15, 2025
Photo byBut O'Leary insists some changes must be made before the president puts pen to paper and makes the plan law.
'I read it and said, 'This can't be right. Why would they do this?'' he said. 'It's outrageous that they would attack small business like this, and unprecedented to get powers to the IRS like this because it won't stop there.'
'They're looking to save money. I get it, ERC saved millions of businesses,' O'Leary clarified. 'And some people claimed it was fraudulent. Sure, there's fraud in every government program. But 95% of these businesses deserve that money and are still in business because of that money. And now somebody says, give the IRS power to go rip into them. That's not okay.'
Fox News' Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Gov. Abbott readying National Guard for protests, not the first time
AUSTIN (KXAN) – Gov. Greg Abbott has called up Texas National Guard members to at least two Texas cities, in response to immigration-related protests, officials from Austin and San Antonio have confirmed. It isn't the first time Abbott has brought in guardsmen in reaction to protesters. Mayor: TX National Guard on standby to assist DPS during protests in Austin The governor previously activated more than 3,800 Texas National Guard members, including Army National Guard soldiers, in 2020 amid the George Floyd protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Texas Military Department. The National Guard was not called in for the pro-Palestine student protests at the University of Texas at Austin last year, according to AP News, but more than 100 Department of Public Safety troopers were deployed, The Texas Tribune reported. Abbott said this current deployment of Texas National Guard is meant to 'ensure peace & order.' 'Peaceful protest is legal,' Abbott said in a social media post. 'Harming a person or property is illegal & will lead to arrst.' Bringing in the National Guard has drawn mixed reactions from local and state officials. KXAN's Kelly Wiley is reporting on the state's use of the National Guard, and we will be updating this report throughout the day. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
After images of unrest comes the political spin, distorting the reality on the ground in L.A.
Driverless Waymo vehicles, coated with graffiti and engulfed in flames. Masked protesters, dancing and cavorting around burning American flags. Anonymous figures brazenly blocking streets and shutting down major freeways, raining bottles and rocks on the police, while their compatriots waved Mexican flags. The images flowing out of Los Angeles over nearly a week of protests against federal immigration raids have cast America's second most populous city as a terrifying hellscape, where lawbreakers rule the streets and regular citizens should fear to leave their homes. In the relentless fever loop of online and broadcast video, it does not matter that the vast majority of Los Angeles neighborhoods remain safe and secure. Digital images create their own reality and it's one that President Trump and his supporters have used to condemn L.A. as a place that is "out of control" and on the brink of total collapse. The images and their true meaning and context have become the subject of a furious debate in the media and among political partisans, centered on the true roots and victims of the protests, which erupted on Friday as the Trump administration moved aggressively to expand its arrests of undocumented immigrants. Read more: Newsom, in California address, says Trump purposely 'fanned the flames' of L.A. protests As the president and his supporters in conservative media tell it, he is the defender of law and order and American values. They cast their opponents as dangerous foreign-born criminals and their feckless enablers in the Democratic Party and mainstream media. The state's political leaders and journalists offer a compelling rebuttal: that Trump touched off several days of protest and disruption with raids that went far beyond targeting criminals, as he previously promised, then escalated the conflict by taking the highly unusual step of sending the National Guard and Marines to Southern California. Reaction to the raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the subsequent turmoil will divide Americans on what have become partisan lines that have become so predictable they are "calcified," said Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at UCLA. "The parties want to build very different worlds, voters know it, and they know which world they want to live in," said Vavreck, who has focused on the country's extreme political polarization. "And because the parties are so evenly divided, and this issue is so personal to so many, the stakes are very high for people." As a curfew was imposed Tuesday, the sharpest street confrontations appeared to be fading and a national poll suggested Americans have mixed feelings about the events that have dominated the news. The YouGov survey of 4,231 people found that 50% disapprove of the Trump administration's handling of deportations, compared with 39% who approve. Pluralities of those sampled also disagreed with Trump's deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to Southern California. But 45% of those surveyed by YouGov said they disapprove of the protests that began after recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. Another 36% approved of the protests, with the rest unsure how they feel. Faced with a middling public response to the ICE raids and subsequent protests, Trump continued to use extreme language to exaggerate the magnitude of the public safety threat and to take credit for the reduction in hostilities as the week progressed. In a post on his TruthSocial site, he suggested that, without his military intervention, 'Los Angeles would be burning just like it was burning a number of months ago, with all the houses that were lost. Los Angeles right now would be on fire.' In reality, agitators set multiple spot fires in a few neighborhoods, including downtown Los Angeles and Paramount, but the blazes in recent days were tiny and quickly controlled, in contrast to the massive wildfires that devastated broad swaths of Southern California in January. Trump's hyperbole continued in a fundraising appeal to his supporters Tuesday. In it, he again praised his decision to deploy the National Guard (without the approval of California Gov. Gavin Newsom), concluding: 'If we had not done so, Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated.' The Republican had assistance in fueling the sense of unease. His colleagues in Congress introduced a resolution to formally condemn the riots. 'Congress steps in amid 'out-of-control' Los Angeles riots as Democrats resist federal help,' Fox News reported on the resolution, being led by Rep. Young Kim of Orange County. A journalist based in New Delhi pronounced, based on unspecified evidence, that Los Angeles 'is descending into a full-blown warzone.' Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas Collins suggested that the harm from the protesters was spreading; announcing in a social media post that a care center for vets in downtown L.A. had been temporarily closed. "To the violent mobs in Los Angeles rioting in support of illegal immigrants and against the rule of law,' his post on X said, 'your actions are interfering with Veterans' health care." A chyron running with a Fox News commentary suggested "Democrats have lost their mind," as proved by their attempts to downplay the anti-ICE riots. Many Angelenos mocked the claims of a widespread public safety crisis. One person on X posted a picture of a dog out for a walk along a neatly kept sidewalk in a serene neighborhood, with the caption: 'Los Angeles just an absolute warzone, as you can see.' In stark contrast to the photos of Waymo vehicles burning and police cars being pelted with rocks, a video on social media showed a group of protestors line dancing. 'Oh my God! They must be stopped before their peaceful and joy filled dance party spreads to a city near you!' the caption read. 'Please send in the Marines before they start doing the Cha Cha and the Macarena!' And many people noted on social media that Sunday's Pride parade in Hollywood for the LGBTQ+ community went off without incident, as reinforced by multiple videos of dancers and marchers celebrating along a sun-splashed parade route. But other activists and Democrats signaled that they understand how Trump's position can be strengthened if it appears they are condoning the more extreme episodes that emerged along with the protests — police being pelted with bottles, businesses being looted and buildings being defaced with graffiti. On Tuesday, an X post by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass reiterated her earlier admonitions: "Let me be clear: ANYONE who vandalized Downtown or looted stores does not care about our immigrant communities,' the mayor wrote. "You will be held accountable." Read more: ICE expands immigration raids into California's agricultural heartland The activist group Occupy Democrats posted a message online urging protesters to show their disdain for the violence and property damage. 'The moment violence or property damage begins, EVERY OTHER PROTESTER must immediately sit on the floor or the ground in silence, with signs down,' the advisory suggested. 'The media needs to film this. This will reveal paid fake thugs posing as protesters becoming violent. ….The rest of us will demonstrate our non-violent innocence and retain our Constitutional right to peaceful protest.' Craig Silverman, a journalist and cofounder of Indicator, a site that investigates deception on digital platforms, said that reporting on the context and true scope of the protests would have a hard time competing with the visceral images broadcast into Americans' homes. 'It's inevitable that the most extreme and compelling imagery will win the battle for attention on social media and on TV,' Silverman said via email. 'It's particularly challenging to deliver context and facts when social platforms incentivize the most shocking videos and claims, federal and state authorities offer contradictory messages about what's happening.' Dan Schnur, who teaches political science at USC and UC Berkeley, agreed. 'The overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful,' Schnur said, 'but they don't do stories on all the planes that land safely at LAX, either.' Though it might be too early to assess the ultimate impact of the L.A. unrest, Schnur suggested that all of the most prominent politicians in the drama might have accomplished their messaging goals: Trump motivated his base and diverted attention from his nasty feud with his former top advisor, Elon Musk, and the lack of progress on peace talks with Russia and Ukraine. Newsom "effectively unified the state and elevated his national profile" by taking on Trump. And Bass, under tough scrutiny for her handling of the city's wildfire disaster, has also gotten a chance to use Trump as a foil. What was not disputed was that Trump's rapid deployment of the National Guard, without the approval of Newsom, had little precedent. And sending the Marines to L.A. was an even more extreme approach, with experts saying challenges to the deployment would test the limits of Trump's power. The federal Insurrection Act allows the deployment of the military for law enforcement purposes, but only under certain conditions, such as a national emergency. California leaders say Trump acted before a true emergency developed, thereby preempting standard protocols, including the institution of curfews and the mobilization of other local police departments in a true emergency. Even real estate developer Rick Caruso, Bass' opponent in the last election, suggested Trump acted too hastily. 'There is no emergency, widespread threat, or out of control violence in Los Angeles,' Caruso wrote on X Sunday. 'And absolutely no danger that justifies deployment of the National Guard, military, or other federal force to the streets of this or any other Southern California City.' 'We must call for calm in the streets,' Caruso added, 'and deployment of the National Guard may prompt just the opposite.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
