Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Draws On Bartending Experience To Slam Trump's Bill
She argued that the way a popular campaign proposal, 'no tax on tips,' was written in the bill meant it would have a small impact for most tipped service industry workers — and potentially come at the expense of food assistance, health care and other essential government benefits.
The congresswoman spoke for around two minutes on the House floor during a period of debate on the legislation. She began by responding to an insult from Trump.
'He says he doesn't think I'm too much of a smart person,' she said. 'It doesn't take a smart person to know if you're being lied to. President Trump, you're either being lied to, or you're lying to the American people because this bill represents — in the text of this bill — the largest and greatest loss of health care in American history.'
Then she pivoted: 'On this point, on tax on tips, as one of the only people in this body who has lived off of tips, I want to tell you a little bit about the scam of that text, a little bit of the fine print there,' she said.
Ocasio-Cortez worked at a Manhattan restaurant to help her family make ends meet before winning her seat in 2018.
She continued: 'The cap on that is $25,000 while you're jacking up taxes on people who make less than $50,000 across the United States, while taking away their SNAP, while taking away their Medicaid, while kicking them off of the ACA [Affordable Care Act] and their health care extensions. So if you're at home, and you're living off tips, you do the math. Is that worth it to you? Losing all your health care, not being able to feed your babies, not being able to put a diaper on their bottom, in exchange for what?'
An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would likely leave some 16 million Americans uninsured.
'This bill is a deal with the devil,' Ocasio-Cortez said. 'It explodes our national debt. It militarizes our entire economy. And it strips away health care and the basic dignity of the American people for what? To give Elon Musk a tax break?'
'You should be ashamed,' Ocasio-Cortez told her Republican colleagues before walking away from the podium, inspiring a rebuke from House Speaker Pro Tempore Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) about avoiding personal attacks.
An analysis by The New York Times based on an earlier version of the bill — which did not set a cap — found that the Republicans' 'no tax on tips' plan would benefit a narrower category of workers than the slogan implies. The $25,000 limit on the amount of tips that workers can claim in their deductions would shrink the benefits of the policy further.
The broad idea remains popular though, both with elected officials and voters.
With the Senate having very narrowly passed a different version of the 'big, beautiful bill' on Tuesday, the legislation is now back in the House for possible revisions and approval.
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Factbox-How Fed Chair Powell has used Jackson Hole to signal what's next
(Reuters) -One last time since President Donald Trump nominated him to lead the U.S. central bank in late 2017, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday will walk through the Jackson Lake Lodge's expansive lobby, past the taxidermied grizzly bear, and into a ballroom lighted with elk-antler chandeliers to deliver a speech at the global central bankers' influential symposium in Wyoming. In his seven previous Jackson Hole speeches, Powell has touched on a range of issues, from esoteric economic concepts and monetary policy history lessons to pledges of policy support through the COVID-19 pandemic and the central bank's determination to win the inflation war that followed. Each speech, too, has included some measure of preview for the Fed's next interest rate moves, and that above all else is why Powell will have the world's attention at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Friday. Here is what he has previously said, and what happened next: 2018: STARS AND RATE HIKES AHEAD Powell's first - and longest - Jackson Hole speech set out his approach to policymaking, focused on "navigating by the stars" - the economics world's shorthand for concepts like the natural rate of unemployment and neutral interest rate. He did, though, offer a view on what was coming down the pike. What Powell said: "Let me conclude by returning to the matter of navigating between the two risks I identified - moving too fast and needlessly shortening the expansion, versus moving too slowly and risking a destabilizing overheating. ... I see the current path of gradually raising interest rates as the FOMC's approach to taking seriously both of these risks." What the Fed did: Following the two quarter-percentage-point rate hikes in the first half of the year, the central bank's policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee delivered two more quarter-percentage-point hikes before the end of the year. 2019: TRUMP TARIFFS 1.0 AND RATE CUTS Part history lesson and part dissection of the trade policy moves in Trump's first term in the White House that were starting to blur the outlook, Powell's 2019 speech was met within hours by the U.S. president asking on social media "who is our bigger enemy" - Powell or Chinese leader Xi Jinping? What Powell said: "We have been monitoring three factors that are weighing on this favorable outlook: slowing global growth, trade policy uncertainty, and muted inflation. ... we will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion, with a strong labor market and inflation near its symmetric 2% objective." What the Fed did: It followed a quarter-percentage-point rate cut that July with two more such reductions in borrowing costs in September and October, far less than what Trump had demanded. Then the pandemic arrived, and everything changed. 2020: 'INCLUSIVE' EMPLOYMENT, AVERAGE 2% INFLATION Delivered remotely because of the pandemic, Powell's speech in 2020 laid out a new approach to policy that placed greater weight on defending the Fed's employment mandate. What Powell said: "Our revised statement emphasizes that maximum employment is a broad-based and inclusive goal. ... Employment can run at or above real-time estimates of its maximum level without causing concern, unless accompanied by signs of unwanted increases in inflation or the emergence of other risks that could impede the attainment of our goals. ... Following periods when inflation has been running below 2%, appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2% for some time." What the Fed did: In September it adopted a new three-part test, seen at the time as an outgrowth of the new framework, for raising interest rates: the attainment of maximum employment and 2% inflation, and indications that inflation will "moderately exceed 2% for some time." The promise helped support the economy's recovery from the pandemic shock, but the stringent hurdle for restarting rate hikes was later blamed for slowing the Fed's response to inflation the following year. 2021: NO RATE HIKES NEEDED FOR NOW In a second straight virtual appearance, Powell dismissed signs of the coming inflation wave as "transitory" - a word he has come to regret ever uttering. What Powell said: "Current high inflation readings are likely to prove transitory ... If a central bank tightens policy in response to factors that turn out to be temporary, the main policy effects are likely to arrive after the need has passed ... 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Restoring price stability will likely require maintaining a restrictive policy stance for some time." What the Fed did: It delivered two more 75-basis-point rate increases to follow the two it had done in the meetings before Powell's speech, and then increased the policy rate in smaller increments until it reached the 5.25%-5.50% range in July 2023. 2023: RATE HIKES STILL POSSIBLE In remarks that were less stern than those delivered the previous year, Powell held out the possibility of more rate hikes while acknowledging the signs of progress in reining in inflation. What Powell said: "We will proceed carefully as we decide whether to tighten further or, instead, to hold the policy rate constant and await further data. Restoring price stability is essential to achieving both sides of our dual mandate. ... We will keep at it until the job is done." 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Americans worry democracy in danger amid gerrymandering fights, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds
By Jason Lange, Unknown f781ef79-b713-474d-aef1-1fc7112288ee and James Oliphant WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Most Americans believe that efforts to redraw U.S. House of Representatives districts to maximize partisan gains, like those under way in Texas and California, are bad for democracy, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found. More than half of respondents -- 57% -- said they feared that American democracy itself was in danger, a view held by eight in 10 Democrats and four in 10 in President Donald Trump's Republican Party. The six-day survey of 4,446 U.S. adults, which closed on Monday, showed deep unease with the growing political divisions in Washington -- where Republicans control both chambers of Congress -- and state capitals. The poll found that 55% of respondents, including 71% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, agreed that ongoing redistricting plans - such as those hatched by governors in Texas and California in a process known as gerrymandering - were "bad for democracy." At Trump's urging, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called a special session of the state legislature to redraw the state's congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, aiming to help Republicans defend their 219-212 U.S. House majority. Incumbent presidents' parties typically lose House seats in midterms, which can block their legislative agendas and in Trump's first term led to two impeachment probes. California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, a White House hopeful in 2028, has threatened to try to redraw his state's district map in response, adding five Democratic seats to offset Republicans' expected Texas gains. The practice is not new but has gained attention because it is happening mid-decade rather than following a census. It has meant that the vast majority of House races are not competitive in general elections; in recent decades about two-thirds of them were won by more than 20 percentage points. As president, Trump has flouted democratic norms with steps including directing the U.S. Justice Department to pursue his political adversaries, pressuring the independent Federal Reserve to lower rates and seizing control of Washington, D.C.'s police force. In interviews, Texas Republicans who participated in the poll largely supported the state's potential redistricting, while Democrats described it as 'cheating' but supported the idea of Democratic states trying to respond in kind. The poll had a margin of error of about 2 percentage points when describing the views of all Americans and about 3 points for the views of Republicans and Democrats. 'SHADY BUSINESS' Amanda Kelley, 51, an insurance fraud investigator in Dallas, was the rare Republican to criticize the Texas effort. "I don't like it when either side tries to do that. I think that's shady business," Kelley said. 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William Watson: The 'post-American world economy' will be a grim place
Unique in so many ways already, Donald Trump has broken yet another precedent and prompted a special pre-release of the Fraser Institute's 'Economic Freedom of the World' report. This week's spoiler details how Trump's tariffs are affecting freedom in a country whose anthem claims it's 'the land of the free' (also 'the home of the brave, except regarding Vladimir Putin'). The latest U.S. freedom news is not good. Largely because of the tariffs, the Americans have dropped from fifth place overall to 10th. The pre-release doesn't say where we stand but in last year's ranking we were eighth, so if that holds we're more free economically than they are. In terms of freedom to trade, the Americans are way down, falling from 56th place to 76th — compared with our own 34th place. Deciding for yourself who to buy goods and services from is clearly a big part of economic freedom. In that respect, Trump's tariffs substantially reduce Americans' freedom. And their effect isn't small. The president's trademark vagaries mean the tariffs have been a moving target, but in mid-April the U.S. had the second highest average tariffs of 165 countries tracked, behind only the Bahamas. World bests are often prized — ask the Guinness people — but being near the top of the tariff list put the U.S. in undistinguished company: numbers three, four and five were Sudan, Djibouti and Iran. No disrespect to the fine people who live in those places but they are not economic exemplars. The pre-release's authors (Robert Lawson of Southern Methodist University and Matthew D. Mitchell of the Fraser Institute) stress the strong inverse correlation between tariffs and GDP. Per capita GDP among the 15 countries with the highest average tariffs (not including the U.S.) was just US$9,703, while among the 15 countries with the lowest average tariffs it was US$43,502. Correlation isn't causality and the U.S. won't soon see its GDP falling to Sudanese or even Bahamian levels but those numbers do give pause. The U.S. tariff revolution has happened stunningly quickly. On Feb. 3, not yet 200 days ago, the average U.S. tariff rate was still 2.4 per cent, pretty much where it had been for 20 years, according to the Yale Budget Lab. As of this writing, it's 18.6 per cent, its highest level since the mid-1930s. In fairness, Donald Trump did run in 2024, as he had in 2016, on a platform of higher tariffs. But he ran on hundreds of other things, too, and while most of his supporters (and many of his opponents) almost certainly appreciate aggressiveness on trade policy, I doubt they expected tariffs this high. Which gives hope to us liberal-internationalists that, like the calamitous Smoot-Hawley tariff spikes in the early 1930s, the Trump episode can soon be reversed — though preferably more quickly than the two-plus decades it took to get average U.S. tariffs back down to their post-World War I lows. If that doesn't happen, a new article in Foreign Affairs Magazine argues that life as a U.S. ally and continental neighbour will not be fun. Titled 'The New Economic Geography,' it's by Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Both the magazine and the institute are arsenals of liberal-internationalist thinking, so you know where he's coming from. But his argument is persuasive. It is that in 'the post-American world economy,' the U.S. will no longer provide the extensive insurance services — military, financial and economic — that it has supplied for the past 80 years. These have included freedom of navigation, support for property rights, 'rules for international trade, and stable dollar assets in which to transact business and store money.' The U.S. itself benefited a lot from the relatively benign international environment its influence created. But now Donald Trump 'has switched the United States' role from global insurer to extractor of profit' — or, you might say, protection money. Today the U.S. itself is the threat, with the Trump administration promising 'to spare clients from its own assaults for a higher price than before.' Nice little economy you have here; you wouldn't want anything to happen to it, would you? Ironically, in this 'gangster's paradise,' the country 'whose behaviour most U.S. officials want to change (China's), will likely be least affected, while the United States' closest allies will be the most damaged.' That means us, of course — though perhaps we're not quite as close a U.S. ally as we like to think, given our absence from this week's Washington strategy session on Ukraine. Posen argues that other close U.S. allies will eventually follow our lead, such as it is, and try to diversify away from the U.S. But that will cost: 'If substitute markets, investments and products were just as valuable,' they would have been chosen in the first place. And what is the likely U.S. reaction to attempts to diversify? Suppose we follow through on this week's approach to Sweden by Industry Minister Mélanie Joly regarding our possible purchase of Gripen E fighter jets instead of U.S. F-35s. What sort of hissy fit will that prompt from Donald Trump? Closing the U.S. border to the six Canadian NHL teams? Diverting the Niagara River to shut down the falls? Non-CUSMA tariffs of 1,000 per cent or higher? Unilateral suspension of CUSMA? William Watson: Any help for tariff-hit firms needs to be temporary Terence Corcoran: CUPE and the 'crime' behind the Air Canada strike If you're easily depressed, don't read Posen all the way through. With hard times ahead, it's best to enjoy what's left of summer. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
