Latest news with #budget
SBS Australia
3 hours ago
- Business
- SBS Australia
'We will determine our defence budget': PM defies US calls to increase defence spending
'We will determine our defence budget': PM defies US calls to increase defence spending Published 2 June 2025, 3:25 am Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has resisted calls made by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth in Singapore to boost Australia's defence spending, ahead of his highly anticipated first face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump later this month. It comes amid backlash against the US doubling tariffs on steel and aluminium imports.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Louisiana Senate to debate budget after committee approval
BATON ROUGE, La. (LouisianaFirstNews) – The Senate Finance Committee approved the state's operating budget for next year during a Sunday hearing. Gov. Jeff Landry signs bills to address Louisiana's insurance crisis The bill will now head to the full Senate for debate. Afterward, it will return to the Louisiana House of Representatives for concurrence before heading to the Governor. The Senate committee restored $30 million in high-dose tutoring for K-12 students and maintained the $199 million appropriated for teacher stipends. All of the budget bills collectively include funding for state agencies. Action by the committee utilizes an additional $60M in state general funds recognized after the Revenue Estimating Committee met last week. 'After hearing public testimony last week, the committee unanimously adopted a set of amendments that address many of the needs our communities and families depend upon,' said Finance Chair Glen Womack. 'This is a responsible budget that brings some wins home for our state and I look forward to moving it favorably in the Senate.' The 2025 Regular Legislative Session must adjourn no later than Thursday, June 12th, at 6:00 pm. Information from a press release from the Louisiana Legislature contributed to this report. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
CTA faces massive cuts as Illinois budget ignores looming $770M shortfall
CHICAGO () — Lawmakers wrapped up the spring session without allocating any funding for the Chicago Transit Authority, leaving no plan in place to address a looming large fiscal cliff next year. 'We moved closer to the cliff, there was not a favorable outcome in Springfield. And we're now left quite concerned that we could see these draconian cuts and there's no clear solution,' Joe Sweeterman said. 'It's a scary time.' Sweeterman, a transportation professor at DePaul University, spoke Sunday about a $55.2 billion budget approved by a Democratic controlled legislature, which includes millions of dollars in new taxes but no money for the CTA. 'It was a shock. The so-called cuts are just months away,' Sweeterman said. Right now, the CTA faces a $770 million budgetary gap in 2026 due to the expiration of COVID-19 federal grant funding and a decline in ridership but it's still a vital mode of transportation for many. 'I'll be commuting for school. I'm transferring to Chicago next year, so that makes me nervous. Am I gonna have a train to get to school? Am I gonna have to get there early? Is it safe?' Madeline Jackson said. If the shortfall isn't addressed, the CTA, Metra and Pace could see services slashed by an estimated 40% and result in thousands of job cuts. Michelle Velasco uses the system regularly and says any reduction of services would be devastating. 'I think it helps everyone that comes here. It'll make it harder for people to get to work or to live,' Velasco said. One bill to help alleviate the pressure proposed a $1.50 tax on food and parcel deliveries. It passed the Senate but never made it to the House Floor. 'We certainly thought there might be at least a stopgap solution to buy some time. It is discouraging to see this get kicked down the road,' Sweeterman said. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Regional Transit Authority told WGN in part: 'We are grateful for the months of work of the General Assembly toward both funding and reform for the region's transit system. It's clear that many in both the House and Senate support transit, and our intention is to build on that shared support to identify the funding needed to avoid devastating cuts and disruption for everyone in Northeast Illinois.' Lawmakers could head back to Springfield in the summer for a special session to address the issue. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Independent
14 hours ago
- Business
- The Independent
Elon Musk caps off DOGE exit by leaving Trump and Johnson unpleasant parting gift
Elon Musk departed Washington this week, bringing one of the weirdest sagas in the history of the presidency to a close. Not everyone leaves DC with their reputation intact. But most people manage to get through it without their bladder control abilities making it into a New York Times exposé. So ends the Elon show. On Sunday, Washington saw its last gasp — a final, awkward sitdown between Musk and CBS Sunday Morning. Despite an awkward attempt by Musk to change the terms of the interview last-minute and bar any mention of politics, he answered questions about the end of DOGE and the budget reconciliation plan endorsed by Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and the majority of House Republicans. In his interview, Musk made it clear he hadn't gotten the memo that Johnson and other Republicans want their caucus to lie about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) score, which the speaker and others are now unconvincingly pretending is a group of liberal activists. Meanwhile, conservatives in their own caucus — the same deficit hawks who held Johnson to cuts of nearly $1 trillion affecting Medicaid — continue to cite the CBO's methodology as they hammer Johnson and their colleagues for insufficient deficit spending cuts. Musk's comments on that budget bill, released in the lead-up to CBS's interview last week, set off a firestorm in Washington. There was an obvious reason: Musk, in one fell swoop, undermined the entirety of the budget plan and essentially made Johnson out to be a liar — if you believe Musk, who no longer has a reason to play nice in Washington. "I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn't decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,' Musk told CBS News. Musk's demeanor was similar to the eyebrow-raising performance he delivered during his final press conference this week with Donald Trump — when he seemed visibly distracted by the gold ornamentation of the room and stood in a decidedly odd manner next to the (literally) sitting president of the United States. "I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful," he went on. "But I don't know if it could be both. My personal opinion." Oops. With that quote, Musk did damage that was still being felt on Sunday, when the rest of his interview aired. At practically the same moment that his comments were re-broadcast, Speaker Mike Johnson was facing an uncomfortable grilling from NBC's Meet the Press about the bill and whether it cut the deficit significantly, or even at all. "I sent my good friend Elon a long text message explaining it can be big and beautiful," Johnson claimed. He repeated his insistence that the bill is 'not going to add to the debt' during his own interview, despite the CBO's outlook. Certainly, the guy who brought the motto 'move fast and break things' to Washington is going to read that text. Regardless of how that particular conversation turns out, the damage is done. Johnson's problem is simple: his own caucus does not believe his insistence about the 'big, beautiful bill' being deficit-neutral. Why should anyone else? Johnson wishes it were as simple as convincing Americans (and the media) that Democrats are the only ones opposed to his deficit math. In reality, some of the staunchest debt hawks in Washington — all conservatives — are in the same camp. If one needs proof, they can simply ask Chip Roy, one of the leaders of those debt hawks. Roy, in his final statement about the bill's passage in May, explained that he voted for the bill to achieve deficit cuts — but even he lamented that the bill did not go further in that regard. 'The good news is that the bill technically held true to that framework by yielding modest deficit reduction over a 10-year budget window,' said Roy. 'Importantly, it does this by cutting spending $1.5 trillion over 10 years, reforming programs like Medicaid and SNAP with work requirements.' It should be obvious, but just to be clear: 'modest deficit reduction' does not equal a budget that is deficit-neutral. The 'one big, beautiful bill' is still projected to add nearly $4 trillion to the deficit after those cuts, according to the CBO and other analysts. This offhand comment from Musk won't make his life any harder. He returns to Tesla, now bearing the brunt of a stunning drop in profits tied directly to his political activism. By doing so, he exits an unfamiliar arena: Washington, a place where public perception matters and can change on a dime. It will, however, make things a lot harder for Johnson and Senate Republican leadership, the latter of whom will now oversee the bill's fate for the next month. Already, Republicans are talking about changing the bill — including, potentially, by splitting 'one' big beautiful bill into several. Those Senate Republicans only acquired more ammunition to defy the White House and Johnson on Sunday. One of those Republicans is Ron Johnson, who, like his conservative allies in the House, has been one of the most vocal deficit spending watchdogs in Congress. Even before Musk's latest comments, Johnson was publicly prepared to buck the White House over the bill's price tag. After Sunday, the combination of the Musk interview and the Senate's hair-thin margin may give him all the political cover he needs. 'Republican leaders repeatedly say, 'We don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem,'' Johnson tweeted before the bill passed the House. 'Right now, it doesn't appear that they are willing to fix it.' 'I am going to insist that we do,' he warned.
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Mike Johnson and Russ Vought Continue to Lie About Medicaid Cuts
Donald Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, alleged without evidence that 'no one will lose [Medicaid] coverage as a result' of the House's proposed budget. House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly claimed 'People will not lose their Medicaid unless they choose to do so.' 'There are no Medicaid cuts in the big, beautiful bill,' Johnson said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. 'We're not cutting Medicaid.' 'This bill will preserve and protect the programs, the social safety net, but it will make it much more commonsense,' Vought said on CNN's State of the Union. 'Look, one out of every five or six dollars in Medicaid is improper. We have illegal immigrants on the program. We have able-bodied working adults that don't have a work requirement that they would have in TANF or even SNAP. And that's something that's very important to institute. That's what this bill does. No one will lose coverage as a result of this bill.' There's a lot to unpack here. Vought, who was a major architect of Project 2025, said that between one fifth and one sixth of Medicaid spending is 'improper.' According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, in 2024, however, just 7.66 percent of payments were considered 'improper.' But 'improper' covers a lot of payments, including underpayments, overpayments, and payments where there is not enough information to determine if a payment was proper. In other words, improper is not a synonym for fraudulent. Vought additionally claimed that undocumented immigrants are on Medicaid. Except for emergency room services in certain situations, federal Medicaid funds cannot be used to cover undocumented immigrants. Some states, however, have chosen to use their own funds to provide health coverage to undocumented immigrants, including children. Lastly, Vought and Johnson said the bill will not cause people to lose coverage. Several experts and organizations expose this for the lie that it is. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the Republican budget passes, it would reduce federal Medicaid spending by $723 billion, and 7.6 million people would lose Medicaid coverage by 2034, thanks in large part to new work requirements for those age 18-64. Other changes to the program, such as stricter and more frequent eligibility checks, will also likely lead to lost coverage. Citing two states that have implemented similar work requirements on Medicaid recipients to those proposed in the GOP bill, Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured and the director of State Health Policy and Data at Kaiser Family Foundation, said on PBS, 'These new rules pose barriers to people enrolling in coverage and lead to coverage loss. And this is loss of coverage among people who are eligible for the requirements, but who have difficulty navigating the reporting requirements and providing the documentation needed to verify that they in fact meet the requirement.' The left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which estimated that up to 14.4 million people could lose coverage over the next 10 years, said, 'Research shows — and the CBO previously concluded — that work requirements do not increase employment. Instead, they lead enrollees who lose coverage to take on more medical debt, delay getting needed medical care, and delay taking medications.' Losing coverage can lead to serious consequences. Having coverage saves lives. One study by the National Bureau of Economic research found that Medicaid expansions increased enrollment by 12 percent and reduced mortality among low-income adults by 2.5 percent, and new Medicaid enrollees were 21 percent less likely to die compared to before they had coverage. More from Rolling Stone Trump Spreads Bizarre Conspiracy Theory That Biden Was Executed and Replaced by a Robot Clone How a Radical Ideology Infected the Supreme Court and Poisoned the Country 'Of Course I'm Going to Testify': Mike Lindell's Defamation Trial Is Going to Be Wild Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
