The Bulletin July 7, 2025
Why it matters: Netanyahu told reporters at Ben-Gurion Airport when asked about a hostage deal that his team was "working to reach this deal under the terms we have agreed to," the Times of Israel reported. The prime minister added that he also believes "the discussion with President Trump can certainly help achieve a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
Read more in-depth coverage:
Iran's Commanders Send Warning to U.S.
TL/DR: The visit has been in the works for over a week, with expectations that the two leaders will discuss Iran's nuclear program, ending the war in Gaza and the Abraham Accords.
What happens now? In an unusual move, Monday's meeting is not formal talks but instead dinner at 6:30 p.m. ET. Previously, Trump and Netanyahu have held talks in the Oval Office. Additionally, the meeting will be closed to reporters, according to Israeli outlet Haaretz.
Deeper reading Netanyahu to Visit White House as Peace Talks With Hamas Continue
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Yahoo
12 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Who stands to benefit from the new SALT cap? High-earning homeowners in high-tax states.
President Trump's massive new tax bill has a number of changes affecting homeowners. High earners who live in high-tax states are likely to get the biggest breaks. The reason? The new law bumps the cap on state and local tax deductions from $10,000 to $40,000. A boosted SALT cap will make it more advantageous for many homeowners — especially those living in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, and California — to start itemizing their taxes once again. The change could translate to thousands of dollars in annual tax savings for those homeowners, financial planners and tax professionals told Yahoo Finance. By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy Read more: Standard deduction vs. itemized — Which approach is best for you? High earners, especially those who own expensive homes and pay hefty property taxes, can easily end up paying more than $10,000 in state and local taxes in some parts of the country. According to calculations, 40% of homes in New Jersey are taxed at over $10,000 a year, followed by 26% in New York and 19% in Connecticut and California. But even some homeowners outside the coasts are poised to catch a break: In Illinois, 13.7% of properties are taxed at over $10,000, and in Texas, it's 12.4%. Tax policy details seldom catch the attention of Patrick Huey's clients. But Huey, the owner of Victory Independent Planning in Naples, Fla., said his inbox started lighting up with questions last week, especially from clients in New York, Oregon, and California. 'With the new, much higher $40,000 cap, many of these clients will see a meaningful shift in their annual bottom line,' Huey said. 'For some, this is the first time in years that itemizing deductions will make sense again — especially those with larger mortgages.' Prior to 2018, around a third of taxpayers itemized to take advantage of deductions for mortgage interest, state and local taxes, charitable contributions, and medical and education expenses. But President Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doubled the standard deduction and limited some itemizations, pushing more taxpayers toward the standard deduction. Read more: Mortgage interest tax deduction — How it works and when it makes sense In more recent years, only around 10% of taxpayers have opted to itemize their deductions. But a higher SALT cap is likely to make itemization make sense again for a broader swath of people. Bigger mortgage, bigger benefits Homeowners who itemize can also take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction, which is unchanged from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and allows interest deduction on the first $750,000 of a mortgage. The new law reinstated the mortgage insurance premium deduction, which treats premium payments as a form of mortgage interest. Most homeowners who put less than 20% down have to carry mortgage insurance until they build up a certain amount of equity. Learn more: What is mortgage insurance, and how does it work? Huey expects his clients who are working professionals with those large mortgages to benefit the most from the changes. Retirees, who tend to have paid off homes or smaller mortgage balances, are likely to be less impacted. Mortgage interest payments are highest at the beginning of a loan, so a buyer who took on a $350,000 mortgage in 2015, when rates were around 4%, pays about $922 a month in interest today. Someone who received the same-sized mortgage last year, when rates were 7%, pays $2,023. Temporary reprieve While some homeowners can rejoice now, the SALT cap isn't permanent, unlike some other provisions in the law. The new higher limit goes into effect for the 2025 tax year and will rise 1% annually before reverting back to $10,000 in 2030. And households making over $500,000 a year will see a lower cap that falls to $10,000 for the highest earners. While that level of income ranks a household around the top 1% of earners nationwide, it's not unusual for two professionals in certain high-cost-of-living cities. 'Many people that are near the $500,000 income threshold may want to explore ways to lower income via pretax retirement contributions, charitable giving, tax loss harvesting, etc. in order to fully benefit from the $40,000 SALT deduction increase,' said Jake Northrup, the founder of fee-only financial planning firm Experience Your Wealth in Bristol, R.I. Another risk: The changes could ultimately spur additional homebuying demand in many of the regions that already have some of the tightest housing markets in the country, like San Jose, Calif., and the New York metro area. 'Raising the SALT cap creates a greater incentive to own in expensive, high-tax neighborhoods, such as affluent suburbs with high property taxes and good schools,' senior economist Jake Krimmel said in a statement. 'As demand for these neighborhoods rises, expect home prices to edge up there, too.' Claire Boston is a Senior Reporter for Yahoo Finance covering housing, mortgages, and home insurance. Sign up for the Mind Your Money newsletter Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Politico
13 minutes ago
- Politico
How Elon Musk's Third Party Gamble Could Succeed
Elon Musk is reentering national politics after a brief hiatus, vowing to disrupt the midterm elections with a new 'America Party' that will contest a narrow set of federal offices and aim to control the balance of power in Congress. It's a daring scheme if Musk commits to it, which is by no means certain. His alliance with President Trump lasted less than a year, his role at DOGE just a few months and his recent vow of abstinence from national politics only days. So what would a serious attempt at this plan look like? The usual third-party fantasy in Washington involves finding unicorn candidates who can claim the ideological center and rally temperate problem-solvers on all sides (see: Unity08, No Labels, Americans Elect, Bloomberg 2016.) This is a recipe for failure in a divided country where most Americans have chosen a side. Musk's plan can only work if he learns from the most successful political disruptors, including Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left, and identifies places where both political parties are neglecting the real preferences of voters. This means not finding a midpoint on a left-right spectrum but rather seizing issues beyond the standard D-versus-R menu. Trump built his political rise on three areas of policy where much of the electorate felt unrepresented: immigration, trade and global security. He rejected Clinton- and Bush-era consensus on all three. For Musk's new party to have a purpose, it must find similar ideological targets of opportunity. Here are three that might make sense: — Championing free trade. Trump shattered U.S. trade policy and reorganized national politics around protectionism. In a way, he was too successful. Now, there is no longer a major party that consistently backs lowering trade restrictions and defends free trade as a force for good. The Republican Party is so deferential to Trump's worldview that even former free-trade conservatives now mouth support for the most aggressive tariff policy in generations. Among Democrats, there are plenty of officials eager to trash Trump's version of protectionism — and far fewer making an affirmative case for free trade. Even the Biden administration tried to coopt rather than roll back MAGA trade policies. This protectionist consensus excludes most has found since 2015 that at least 60 percent of independent voters consistently see foreign trade as an opportunity rather than a threat; this spring, that number stood at 81 percent and even higher among Democrats. This is a fat opportunity for a political disruptor willing to defy regional voting blocs and special interests. — Radical fiscal rebalancing. Most Americans say they worry about government overspending and debt. Neither major party is credible on this issue. The Biden administration grew the size of government, failed to enact promised tax hikes on the wealthy and only proposed raising taxes in the first place to pay for more spending. Republicans, meanwhile, have put tax cuts ahead of fiscal responsibility at every opportunity for a quarter century; Trump's Big Beautiful Bill put America on track to assume trillions in new debt,obscuring that reality with a brazen congressional accounting trick. It is unclear how many Americans would vote for a take-your-medicine party that advocates fiscal austerity, even if that means asking conservatives to raise taxes and left-leaning voters to give up on resurrecting the New Deal era. Perhaps someone should find out. Musk — whose sneering, chainsaw-swinging DOGE theatrics alienated much of the public — is not the ideal figure to test this proposition. Other wild-card outsiders, running for office backed by Musk's money, might connect on this issue. — Securing American technological and scientific supremacy. Both parties say they want the United States to outcompete China and dominate this century. When it comes to scientific research and technological competition, Republicans and Democrats tend to subordinate that goal to factional and cultural politics. The Trump administration's onslaught against elite universities, its crackdown on foreign students and academics and the grant-slashing spree carried out by DOGE have upended some of America's core strategic assets in a global intellectual arms race. In his post-DOGE persona, Musk also blistered Trump's sprawling tax law for 'severely damaging industries of the future' — a reference to the legislation's attempt to throttle growing parts of the clean-energy sector where the United States is already lagging behind China. Democrats have not gone on the attack like this against incubators of innovation. But they have treated investment in technology as a vehicle for other social change, rather than as an end unto itself. Exhibit A is the Biden administration's implementation of the CHIPS Act, when a law aimed at upgrading U.S. semiconductor manufacturing became an instrument for advancing progressive workplace equity policies. And Biden kept tech tycoons like Musk himself at a distance, viewing them as malignant oligarchs despite some obvious overlapping interests. Despite his DOGE record, Musk could be a magnet for this strain of politics: one that says the United States must win the future by amassing all the intellectual and industrial might it can muster, using every available lever of policy — including the tax code, trade deals, immigration policy, energy regulation and more. High-tech research policy is not typical soapbox fare. But American leaders have a history of inspiring voters with scientific goals, separated from other cultural and interest-group politics. John F. Kennedy did not say the United States would put a man on the moon, so long as rockets were built in compliance with Davis-Bacon. Ronald Reagan did not call for scientists to help make nuclear weapons obsolete, provided that no woke postdocs were working in the lab. Is all this an agenda for Musk's America Party? Probably not. It's unclear that the party will exist in any organized form or that Musk is even capable of executing a disciplined political strategy. Still, in an age of churning disorder in U.S. politics, these ideological gaps and blind spots are opportunities for any political entrepreneur — especially one who can freely spend billions of dollars on an electoral experiment.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Taxpayers Are Supposed To Shell Out $150 Million for Next Year's July 4th Celebrations
Consumer spending on 2025 Fourth of July celebrations is expected to reach $8.9 billion, according to the National Retail Federation—a slight decrease from previous years, but still well above pre-pandemic level spending. Next year, taxpayers can expect to pay even more for Independence Day festivities, albeit indirectly. On Friday, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. Tucked away in the sprawling 870-page tax and spending bill is a section that allocates $150 million for "events, celebrations, and activities surrounding the observance and commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States." The funding, which will be appropriated to the Interior Department, shall remain available through FY 2028. Appropriately, Trump signed the bill—which is expected to add nearly $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade—at a Fourth of July celebration on the White House South Lawn, complete with fireworks and a B-2 jet flyover. Commemorating America's 250th birthday has been a quiet priority of the second Trump administration. In January, the president signed an executive order that established the White House Task Force on Celebrating America's 250th Birthday. The task force, which is housed in the defense department, will coordinate with federal agencies "to plan, organize, and execute an extraordinary celebration of the 250th Anniversary of American Independence and shall coordinate agencies' communications with the United States Semiquincentennial Commission." (The White House has since launched a website that includes a countdown to next year's festivities.) This order also reinstated two executive orders signed during the first Trump administration, which had been rescinded by President Joe Biden, to establish a National Garden of American Heroes. In April, the National Endowment for the Arts began accepting applications from sculptors for the garden, reports Reason's Joe Lancaster. However, the garden faces several roadblocks to its planned opening of July 4, 2026, including a lack of quality sculptures and a designated location. It is unclear exactly how the $150 million included in the bill will be spent, but the cost is exorbitant, even by Trump's standards. In 2019, the president hosted the "Salute to America" event to celebrate that year's July Fourth, which included a grandiose display of America's military power and several flyovers of multiple stealth aircraft that ended up costing American taxpayers more than $13 million, "well above the $6 million to $7 million that had been spent in the previous three years," The Washington Post reported at the time. The following year, Trump held two Independence Day celebrations—one in Washington, D.C., and one at Mount Rushmore on July 3—which drew a price tag of $14,573,608, per Newsweek. More recently, Trump hosted a military parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Army (which fell on his 79th birthday) that included M1 Abrams main battle tanks, over 6,000 marching soldiers, and (yes) more aircraft flyovers. With an estimated cost of $25 million to $45 million, the parade cost taxpayers "$277,778–$500,000 per minute," Reason's Billy Binnion reported. The fact that America is on track to see its 250th anniversary is certainly worth celebrating. However, a state-sponsored celebration that saddles taxpayers with even more debt is the type of event that the founders would diametrically oppose. Lawmakers still have time to rescind the wasteful spending of "big, beautiful bill," but given Trump's hold on the Republican party, and Democrats' penchant for government spending themselves, it is unlikely. For now, taxpayers can look forward to once again financing the federal government's celebration of Independence Day, only this time at a much higher price tag. The post Taxpayers Are Supposed To Shell Out $150 Million for Next Year's July 4th Celebrations appeared first on
