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United News of India
01-08-2025
- Business
- United News of India
Trump fires BLS' Erika McEntarfer over jobs numbers
New York, Aug 1 (UNI) President Donald Trump has fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her, without evidence, of manipulating the monthly jobs reports for 'political purposes'. The BLS' monthly labour report on Friday showed that the US economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, far below expectations. It also sharply revised down the employment growth that had been previously reported in May and June – by a combined 258,000 jobs, reports CNN. After the revisions, the jobs report showed the weakest pace of hiring for any three-month period since the pandemic recession in 2020. 'In my opinion, today's Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,' Trump said in a Truth Social post while calling the revisions a 'mistake'. Although the May and June jobs numbers were worse than initially believed, revisions are normal in this process. The BLS' initial monthly jobs estimates are often based on incomplete data, so they are revised twice after the initial report — followed by an annual revision every February. Additionally, BLS economists use a formula to smooth out jobs' numbers for seasonal variations and that can exacerbate revisions when they fall outside economists' expectations. 'McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months,' Trump continued. 'Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under 'TRUMP.'' Trump said McEntarfer 'faked' the jobs numbers before the election to try to boost former Vice President Kamala Harris' chances in the 2024 presidential election. 'She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can't be manipulated for political purposes,' Trump said on Truth Social Friday. McEntarfer was confirmed by the Senate 86-8 in January 2024 for a term of four years. UNI XC SS
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump Speeds Up Tax Bill Deadline as Tentative SALT Deal Reached
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump amped up pressure on Congress to speed the passage of his tax-cut bill as Republicans reached a tentative deal on the state and local tax deduction, one of the key sticking points in the negotiations. Philadelphia Transit System Votes to Cut Service by 45%, Hike Fares US Renters Face Storm of Rising Costs Squeezed by Crowds, the Roads of Central Park Are Being Reimagined Mapping the Architectural History of New York's Chinatown Sao Paulo Pushes Out Favela Residents, Drug Users to Revive Its City Center 'The House of Representatives must be ready to send it to my desk before July 4th — We can get it done,' Trump said on Truth Social Friday. The new deadline — before July 4 — is somewhat of a reversal for the president who, hours earlier told reporters that it wouldn't be the 'end-all' if negotiations took it a little longer to pass the self-imposed Independence Day goal. On Friday afternoon, the tentative SALT deal suggested that Republicans may have momentum on their side. The agreement involved raising the limit on the state and local tax deduction to $40,000 a year for a five-year period, Senator John Hoeven told reporters. Senators said the tentative plan is to begin voting on the bill Saturday midday. It wasn't immediately clear whether enough of the so-called SALT Republicans in the House would accept that proposal and drop their threats to block President Donald Trump's massive tax and spending package. GOP lawmakers from New York, New Jersey and California have pressed to preserve a deal included in the House bill that increased the deduction cap to $40,000, up from the $10,000 in current law, for 10 years. The original Senate draft kept the write-off at $10,000. The latest deal retains a House proposal to phase out the deduction for taxpayers with at least $500,000 in income, a person familiar said, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. Republicans also plan to drop new limits they had sought on pass-through businesses' deductions of state and local tax taxes, the person said. Until now, some business owners in most states haven't actually needed to abide by the SALT cap that applies to everyone else, thanks to legal workarounds approved by legislatures in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California and dozens of other states. The House version of Trump's massive tax and spending package put curbs on those workarounds. Tax Talks Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at the Capitol that negotiators are 'very, very close' on a SALT deal but he would not discuss specifics. He added that meeting the July 4 deadline provides 'certainty.' The SALT provision has been one of several holdups for the Trump tax bill in the Senate. Senate Republican Leader John Thune is also trying to navigate competing demands from conservatives and moderates on social safety net cuts and the elimination of clean energy tax credits. He will need to resolve most of the disputes to secure the votes he needs to pass the bill. The massive tax and spending package is the legislative centerpiece of Trump's economic agenda. The Senate version makes permanent individual and business tax breaks enacted in 2017, while adding temporary new breaks for tipped and overtime workers, seniors and car-buyers. The bill would add hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending for the military, border patrol and immigration enforcement. To partly pay for the revenue losses, the bill reduces spending on Medicaid health insurance for the poor and disabled, food assistance for low-income Americans and financial aid to college students. The measure would also avert a US payment default as soon as August by raising the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. America's Top Consumer-Sentiment Economist Is Worried How to Steal a House Inside Gap's Last-Ditch, Tariff-Addled Turnaround Push Apple Test-Drives Big-Screen Movie Strategy With F1 Luxury Counterfeiters Keep Outsmarting the Makers of $10,000 Handbags ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. 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
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's April tariff revenue topped $17 billion. That dwarfs any haul from his first term.
President Trump's tariffs became very real for importers last month as the government collected more than $17.4 billion in "Customs and Certain Excise Taxes" during April. That was nearly double March's haul of $9.6 billion, dwarfing the smaller spikes in revenue seen during Trump's first term. All told, the duties have deposited more than $70 billion into government coffers since Jan. 1. "As Billions of Dollars pour in from Tariffs ... we're only in a TRANSITION STAGE, just getting started!!!" Trump said on Truth Social Friday. He could be right. April's data will perhaps provide only a glimpse of what's coming. The biggest tariffs — 10% duties on nearly every country in the world — took effect on April 5, with plenty of additional tariffs promised for the months ahead. Read more: The latest news and updates on Trump's tariffs But also complicating the tariff revenue picture going forward are immediate signs of a drop in shipping volume in response to the duties. The Port of Los Angeles, as one example, is now projecting a drop in cargo volume of more than a third starting next week. The large haul also comes despite significant concessions from Trump in April that offered a reprieve to giant importers like auto and technology makers and countries that had been in line for much higher tariffs before the 90-day reprieve. Read more: What Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet Trump delayed additional "reciprocal" tariffs on more than 100 nations until this summer, with negotiations underway there. He has also promised new sector-specific tariffs to be announced in the weeks or months ahead on items such as semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The data is significant but could be slightly overstated, with the Treasury Department reporting both customs duties and certain excise taxes from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a single category. Excise taxes are different from customs duties, and more precise data is expected in the coming months, but the amount of those taxes collected by DHS historically is small. Trump himself has often touted the surge of government tariff receipts, suggesting the US government is on its way to a repeat of an era of US history that ended more than a century ago when tariffs made up a significant portion of government revenues. "We're going to make a lot of money [from tariffs] and that money's going to be used to reduce taxes," Trump said on April 23. "We're going to get big, big tax breaks." His aides have gone further. This week at that Cabinet meeting, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick touted "the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars coming in." Read more: 5 ways to tariff-proof your finances Stephen Miran, chair of Trump's Council of Economic Advisers, hinted Friday in a Bloomberg television interview that internal administration numbers could be different. "I would be surprised if we had tariff revenue that was less than hundreds of billions of dollars a year," he said, even as he said elsewhere in the interview that coming negotiations could result in lower tariffs within weeks. A White House spokesperson declined to offer any additional context on whether internal White House tariff revenues differ from those released publicly by the Treasury Department in their daily statements. It all has led Trump to toy with the idea that revenue would allow the elimination of income taxes entirely. But while April's surge in revenues is significant, it still represents barely a drop in America's fiscal bucket. As one example, the total tariff revenues in April represent less than a quarter of what the US pays each month just on interest on the national debt. And all monthly government spending in March — the most recent full month of data that is available — was over $528 billion, or more than 31 times April's tariff haul. And that's even before the tax bill currently advancing on Capitol Hill could authorize $5.8 trillion in new red ink in the years ahead. But that hasn't stopped Trump from often claiming that tariffs will fundamentally change the US fiscal picture and sometimes overstating the publicly available numbers. "The number is probably $3.5 billion a day," he said on April 10. He's said $2 billion a day in other contexts — and has been fact-checked repeatedly — with April's total tally including excise taxes and still representing about $580 million a day if it's averaged out. It's part of a focus from Trump on the early 20th century — and the presidency of William McKinley in particular — that has long been an era of lionization for Trump. Indeed, tariff revenue constituted about half of federal revenue in the 1890s. But that figure fell to below 2% in recent decades. Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's April tariff revenue topped $17 billion. That dwarfs any haul from his first term.
President Trump's tariffs became very real for importers last month as the government collected more than $17.4 billion in "Customs and Certain Excise Taxes" during April. That was nearly double March's haul of $9.6 billion, dwarfing the smaller spikes in revenue seen during Trump's first term. All told, the duties have deposited more than $70 billion into government coffers since Jan. 1. "As Billions of Dollars pour in from Tariffs ... we're only in a TRANSITION STAGE, just getting started!!!" Trump said on Truth Social Friday. He could be right. April's data will perhaps provide only a glimpse of what's coming. The biggest tariffs — 10% duties on nearly every country in the world — took effect on April 5, with plenty of additional tariffs promised for the months ahead. Read more: The latest news and updates on Trump's tariffs But also complicating the tariff revenue picture going forward are immediate signs of a drop in shipping volume in response to the duties. The Port of Los Angeles, as one example, is now projecting a drop in cargo volume of more than a third starting next week. The large haul also comes despite significant concessions from Trump in April that offered a reprieve to giant importers like auto and technology makers and countries that had been in line for much higher tariffs before the 90-day reprieve. Read more: What Trump's tariffs mean for the economy and your wallet Trump delayed additional "reciprocal" tariffs on more than 100 nations until this summer, with negotiations underway there. He has also promised new sector-specific tariffs to be announced in the weeks or months ahead on items such as semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The data is significant but could be slightly overstated, with the Treasury Department reporting both customs duties and certain excise taxes from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a single category. Excise taxes are different from customs duties, and more precise data is expected in the coming months, but the amount of those taxes collected by DHS historically is small. Trump himself has often touted the surge of government tariff receipts, suggesting the US government is on its way to a repeat of an era of US history that ended more than a century ago when tariffs made up a significant portion of government revenues. "We're going to make a lot of money [from tariffs] and that money's going to be used to reduce taxes," Trump said on April 23. "We're going to get big, big tax breaks." His aides have gone further. This week at that Cabinet meeting, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick touted "the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars coming in." Read more: 5 ways to tariff-proof your finances Stephen Miran, chair of Trump's Council of Economic Advisers, hinted Friday in a Bloomberg television interview that internal administration numbers could be different. "I would be surprised if we had tariff revenue that was less than hundreds of billions of dollars a year," he said, even as he said elsewhere in the interview that coming negotiations could result in lower tariffs within weeks. A White House spokesperson declined to offer any additional context on whether internal White House tariff revenues differ from those released publicly by the Treasury Department in their daily statements. It all has led Trump to toy with the idea that revenue would allow the elimination of income taxes entirely. But while April's surge in revenues is significant, it still represents barely a drop in America's fiscal bucket. As one example, the total tariff revenues in April represent less than a quarter of what the US pays each month just on interest on the national debt. And all monthly government spending in March — the most recent full month of data that is available — was over $528 billion, or more than 31 times April's tariff haul. And that's even before the tax bill currently advancing on Capitol Hill could authorize $5.8 trillion in new red ink in the years ahead. But that hasn't stopped Trump from often claiming that tariffs will fundamentally change the US fiscal picture and sometimes overstating the publicly available numbers. "The number is probably $3.5 billion a day," he said on April 10. He's said $2 billion a day in other contexts — and has been fact-checked repeatedly — with April's total tally including excise taxes and still representing about $580 million a day if it's averaged out. It's part of a focus from Trump on the early 20th century — and the presidency of William McKinley in particular — that has long been an era of lionization for Trump. Indeed, tariff revenue constituted about half of federal revenue in the 1890s. But that figure fell to below 2% in recent decades. Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance. Click here for political news related to business and money policies that will shape tomorrow's stock prices Sign in to access your portfolio
Fox News
19-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Sen. Van Hollen pours cold water on ‘margarita-gate' photo-op after El Salvador trip: 'Nobody drank any'
Print Close By Jasmine Baehr Published April 18, 2025 Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., says the margaritas were fake. The outrage, he says, is real. Returning from a highly publicized trip to El Salvador to meet with deported illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Van Hollen addressed reporters Thursday after landing at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. He attempted to set the record straight on what's now being dubbed "margarita-gate," a viral photo posted by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that appeared to show the senator and Garcia sitting casually at a table with two salt-rimmed drinks. "Let me just be very clear," Van Hollen said. "Neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us. And if you want to play a little Sherlock Holmes, I'll tell you how you can know that. … If you sip out of one of those glasses, some of whatever it was — salt or sugar — would disappear. You would see a gap. There's no gap. "Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is." KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA SUSPECTED OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN REPORT OBTAINED BY FOX NEWS Van Hollen claimed the glasses were placed after the meeting began as a staged photo-op, adding that earlier footage shows the table without drinks. Van Hollen accused both El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and the Trump administration of trying to distract from what he described as a constitutional crisis. "This is a lesson into the lengths that President Bukele will do to deceive people," Van Hollen said. "And it also shows the lengths that the Trump administration and the president will go to, because when he was asked by a reporter about this, he just went along for the ride." Trump had his own take, posting on Truth Social Friday, "Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!" The controversy stems from the case of Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran national deported from Maryland last month and placed in the country's notorious CECOT prison. WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BLUNTLY SHOWS WHERE PARTIES STAND ON IMMIGRATION AMID ABREGO GARCIA DEPORTATION Federal officials have called the deportation an "administrative error" in court. Van Hollen and other Democrats have since argued it violated Garcia's constitutional right to due process. But the Trump administration has pushed back, pointing to Garcia's alleged domestic abuse, gang ties and suspected involvement in human trafficking. A 2022 Homeland Security Investigations report identified Garcia as a member of MS-13 and a suspected human trafficker. A 2021 domestic violence filing, written by his wife, Jennifer Vasquez, claimed, "I have multiple photos/videos of how violent he can be and all the bruises he [has] left me." Despite these reports, Van Hollen insists no evidence has been presented in court and that the removal was unlawful. He cited rulings by a federal district court and the U.S. Supreme Court ordering Garcia's return. "The government in this case, the Trump administration, is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process," Van Hollen said, quoting a recent Fourth Circuit decision. "That is the foundation of our constitutional order." He added that Judge Paula Xinis, the federal judge who first reviewed the case, found the administration "offered no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any terrorist activity." Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador this week after the Salvadoran government initially denied him access to Garcia. After press coverage, he said, officials arranged a meeting at a hotel, which was filmed. He said Salvadoran soldiers had previously stopped him from approaching the prison and that he was surprised by the last-minute permission to meet. He also revealed that the U.S. had committed $15 million to El Salvador to support detention operations and said over $4 million had already been paid. Van Hollen claimed this funding was unauthorized and pledged to oppose future appropriations. "I won't support the use of one penny of taxpayer dollars to keep Abrego Garcia illegally detained in El Salvador," he said. Critics, including Republicans and Trump allies, have questioned why Van Hollen would travel abroad to advocate for someone with alleged gang ties and a record of domestic abuse while remaining silent on victims like Rachel Morin, a Maryland woman murdered by an illegal immigrant in 2023. The White House drew a sharp contrast, posting side-by-side photos of Trump meeting with Morin's mother and Van Hollen meeting with Abrego Garcia. The caption: "We are not the same." CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Asked about the comparison, Van Hollen said his "heart breaks" for Morin's family but defended his actions as grounded in the Constitution. "The reason we have courts of law is to punish the guilty, but also to make sure that those who have not committed crimes are not found guilty and arbitrarily detained," he said. Fox News' Rachel Wolf, David Spunt, Greg Norman, Greg Wehner, and Bill Mears contributed to this report. Print Close URL
