Baby Huey's li'l Mnuchin goes to Capitol Hill

 
The report by the independent auditors was requested in January by the senior Democrats on the Senate and House tax-writing committees, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts. They asked the GAO to analyze the withholding tables under the new Republican tax law to make sure workers' paychecks weren't being widely under-withheld.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, speaking at a White House press briefing early this year, dismissed that notion as "ridiculous." -- Gordon, AP/US News, July 31, 2018
 
 
 

During a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told angry lawmakers that the administration has no strategy to resolve things with Beijing. Saying trade talks with China had “broken down,” Mnuchin basically admitted that the U.S. was out of ideas, and that it’s up to China to offer concessions—otherwise, the tariffs will continue. “Is there a master plan?” asked Representative Mia Love, to which we imagine Mnuchin became the human embodiment of the 

shrug emoji. -- Levin, Vanity Fair, July 13, 2018

 

 

 
 
7-31-18
AP/US News & World Report
Auditors: 30M Taxpayers Will Owe More Due to Low Withholding
Auditors: 30 million taxpayers will owe more next year because of too-low withholding.
MARCY GORDON
https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2018-07-31/auditors-30m-ta...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional auditors say about 30 million people — 21 percent of U.S. taxpayers — will have to come up with more money to pay their 2018 taxes next year because their employers withheld too little from their paychecks under government tables keyed to the new tax law.
New tax withholding tables for employers were put together by the government early this year. About 30 million workers received pay that was "under-withheld" — making their paychecks bigger this year but bringing a larger bill at tax time next spring, according to the Government Accountability Office's report.
About 27 million taxpayers would have been affected even if the new law hadn't been enacted. The changes, however, added an estimated 3 million to that number.
Millions of American workers started getting fatter paychecks early this year, as employers withheld less money in anticipation of lower income taxes under the law. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a middle-income household should on average get a $930 tax cut this year, lifting its after-tax income by 1.6 percent.
But many taxpayers will end up paying more, because of complications in the new tax law that may not have been taken into account by employers in estimating workers' tax obligations.
The Treasury Department and the IRS are responsible for updating the tax withholding tables each year. Highlighting the importance of accurate tables, the GAO said Treasury and the IRS currently don't lay out in writing their roles and responsibilities for annual updates. The auditors recommended that they do so, in accordance with federal standards for internal controls.
Treasury and the IRS agreed with that recommendation, the report said.
Treasury and the IRS "worked to update withholding tables, worksheets and instructions," Jeffrey Tribiano, IRS deputy commissioner for operations support, said in a letter to the GAO responding to the report. He noted the "tight time constraints" that the agencies worked under.
The report by the independent auditors was requested in January by the senior Democrats on the Senate and House tax-writing committees, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts. They asked the GAO to analyze the withholding tables under the new Republican tax law to make sure workers' paychecks weren't being widely under-withheld.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, speaking at a White House press briefing early this year, dismissed that notion as "ridiculous."
Wyden on Tuesday called the GAO report "an alarm bell for the nearly 30 million households that are expected to owe more money come tax time this spring."
"Withholding tables directly affect the size of paychecks earned by Americans all across the country, and millions of American taxpayers have gotten bad advice under this administration on how much to withhold," Wyden said in a statement.
He said the lack of written documents on Treasury and IRS roles "is an opening for future abuse."
Tax experts suggest that all taxpayers look at the online tax withholding calculator issued by the IRS in February, to ensure they are having the correct amount withheld. Taxpayers also should update the information on their W-4 forms, experts say.
The IRS has said the new withholding tables should produce an accurate withholding amount for people with simpler tax situations. But experts say those who will still itemize under the new law, or have larger families or more complicated tax situations may want to take a closer look.
The GAO's assessment came as news emerged that the Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to give a big tax break to wealthy Americans by reducing taxes levied on capital gains. Administration officials said no decision has been made on whether to proceed.
Cutting capital gains taxes was one of only a few items on the wish list of conservatives and Republicans that didn't make it into the massive tax law hustled through Congress late last year by Republicans, which became President Donald Trump's signature legislative achievement. The $1.5 trillion package provides generous tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans while offering more modest reductions for most low- and middle-income individuals and families. No Democrats voted for the legislation.
House Republicans last week launched an effort to expand the tax law, aiming to make permanent the individual tax cuts and small-business income deductions now set to expire in 2026. The solid Republican majority in the House nearly ensures passage of the proposals before the November elections, but Senate passage is considered unlikely.
 
 
 
 

7-13-18

 

Vanity Fair
Steve Mnuchin Admits White House Has No Idea What It’s Doing On Trade
Talks with China have “broken down,” and the administration has no strategy for resolving the disaster of its own making.
Bess Levin

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/mnuchin-admits-white-house-has-n...

As you’ve probably heard, the Trump administration’s decision last January to start multiple trade wars with countries around the world has not been going well, particularly on the China front. For the past several months, the U.S. and Beijing have been going back and forth upping the ante in response to each other’s punitive measures. And on Tuesday, like a blundering toddler doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, the Trump administration unveiledadditional levies on $200 billion of Chinese goods, hitting everything from tuna to tires to furniture to mattresses to components in flat-panel displays and phones.
Naturally, that led China to announce it would have “no choice but to take necessary countermeasures,” likely in the form of “qualitative measures” like delaying investment approvals involving U.S. companies, increasing inspections of U.S. products at the border, or even consumer boycotts.
That would make life pretty rough for major tech companies like Apple, Nvidia, and Broadcom, which get more than 20 percent of their sales from China, though they’d find themselves in good company with soybean farmers, who’ve said their businesses have taken a major hit since China slapped them with a 25 percent duty.
What’s more, China is clearly irked by the U.S., accusing Trump’s administration of “acting erratically,” and saying it has “blatantly abandoned the consensuses that two sides have reached and insisted on fighting a trade war with China.”
But Donald Trump is a self-described genius businessman who wrote The Art of the Deal, so surely he’s got a plan here, right? According to his Treasury secretary, not so much!
During a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told angry lawmakers that the administration has no strategy to resolve things with Beijing.
Saying trade talks with China had “broken down,” Mnuchin basically admitted that the U.S. was out of ideas, and that it’s up to China to offer concessions—otherwise, the tariffs will continue. “Is there a master plan?” asked Representative Mia Love, to which we imagine Mnuchin became the human embodiment of the shrug emoji. Representative Jeb Hensarling, a supporter of the president, was unimpressed by Mnuchin’s claims that the Treasury is “monitoring the impact on the economy of all these trade issues,” telling the secretary, “I appreciate the words; I am concerned about the deeds.” Meanwhile, lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee didn’t get much more out of Trump official Manisha Singh, who heads the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs:
“The administration needs to explain to Congress where this is all headed,” Senator Bob Corker told Singh. “To my knowledge, not a single person is able to articulate where this is headed, nor what the plans are, nor what the strategy is,” Corker said.
The committee’s top Democrat, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, told Singh at another point that “I don’t understand what the pathway is here, at the end of the day.”
Singh . . . defended the administration’s moves. “Our endgame is for China to change its behavior,” she said.
After Singh tried to explain the administration’s approach, Corker replied, “That enlightened us in no way.”
For its part, China reportedly can’t even tell whom it’s supposed to be negotiating with, after tentative agreements with Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross fell through. “I think they’re coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter whether Mnuchin or Ross or anybody is in the front of the line, that it’s really going to be figuring out what Trump wants,” Claire Reade, an attorney at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, told The New York Times. On Thursday, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a statement saying, “For the purpose of meeting domestic political needs and suppressing China’s development, the U.S. has fabricated a set of policy arguments that distort the truth about Sino-U.S. economic and trade relations.” Things, in other words, are going swimmingly.
Trump was just kidding about everything he was recorded saying about Theresa May, Brexit, trade, 24 hours ago
Remember when Donald Trump told U.K. right-wing rag The Sun that British Prime Minister Theresa May had screwed up Brexit by trying to negotiate a “soft“ deal, and that if she went through with it it he’d likely cancel a previously planned bilateral trade deal between Britain and the U.S., and that her political rival, Boris Johnson, would make a great prime minister, at a time when May is facing a vote of no confidence? You should, because it happened just yesterday. But according to Trump, none of those things ever happened.
Calling The Sun story “generally fine” but also “fake news,” the president claimed on Friday that he “said very good things about [May]” in the interview. “She’s a total professional, because when I saw her this morning I said, ‘I want to apologize, because I said such good things about you.”’ (People often apologize for things they supposedly never said.) He also took back his threat to drop a trade deal with Britain. Yesterday, he claimed a “soft Brexit” would effectively mean he was negotiating with the European Union and you know how he feels about those guys; today he insisted that he “looks forward to finalizing a great bilateral trade deal” with the U.K. “We want to trade with the U.K., and the U.K. wants to trade with us.”

 
 

Surprise: trade wars with no clear plan, unpredictable outcomes scare business execs
 

“It’s kind of affecting psyche more than it is economics,” JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon 

said Friday, discussing the impact of trade wars on business confidence. “There are unpredictable outcomes when you start skirmishes like this with major countries. It’s a worry—hopefully it gets resolved.”
Wilbur Ross heroically sells all of his conflict of interest-riddled stock holdings 18 months after he said he would
Because transparency and public trust are so deeply important to him, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced on Thursday that he has sold off all of his equity holdings a year and a half after he pledged to do so, and that the only reason he hadn’t done so earlier was “inadvertent errors.” We assume he was in no way prompted by a letter from Office of Government Ethics acting Director David Apol, criticizing him for creating the potential for “a serious criminal violation.”
In other truly shocking Ross news, the Trump administration’s resident 19th-century robber baron, in further efforts to resurrect the Teapot Dome scandal for the modern age, has reportedly held dozens of meetings with companies tied to his net worth. Forbesreports:
A detailed review of Ross’s calendar from February to November 2017—his first months in office—reveals dozens of meetings with companies tied to his personal fortune, which he built up over years in private equity. Last March, his calendar lists a meeting with the C.E.O. of Boeing, a company in which Ross’s wife held nearly $3 million worth of stock. In April, his schedule includes another with Minister Ali Shareef Al Emadi, who serves on the board of Qatar Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund that pumped money into one of Ross’s private-equity vehicles. In July, September, and October, Ross’s agenda lists talks with Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, which called a business Ross partly owned a “top performing global supplier.” And so on, and so on.