Palmer Schoening, President of Schoening Strategies and Chairman of the Family Business Coalition is providing tED magazine with an update on decisions coming from Washington, D.C. that will impact our supply chain.
Today he found a key announcement on the Paris Climate Agreement, NAFTA, and health care repeal and reform. If you have questions or you are looking for additional information, you can comment below or e-mail us at info@tedmag.com.
Paris Climate Agreement Decision will be announced by President Trump at 3:00 p.m. today:
That was in a Tweet from President Trump at 9:00 p.m. last night: “I will be announcing my decision on Paris Accord, Thursday at 3:00 p.m. The White House Rose Garden. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
This morning, Politico’s Playbook reports, “Inside the White House, there is near uniform agreement Trump will pull out, but some senior aides still think Trump will try to squeeze out a “better deal” by only partially ditching the climate accord.”
Last night’s Politico article adds:
One of the biggest lingering questions: If he withdraws, how will Trump do it? He could abide by the formal procedures in the underlying text of the agreement, which mandate that a formal withdrawal will not go into effect until at least Nov. 4, 2020. Or he could pull out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the underlying 1992 treaty that governs the negotiations, which would allow for a speedier pullout — a far more radical step that would see the U.S. abstain from the entire climate negotiating process. He could also declare that the agreement is a treaty, which would require a two-thirds-majority ratification vote in the Senate that would certainly fail.
ObamaCare partial repeal by July sought by Senate Majority Whip:
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Wednesday that the Senate will repeal and replace ObamaCare no later than “the end of July.”
“Absolutely,” he said Wednesday on “The Chad Hasty Show” when asked if that goal is possible before 2017 ends. “We’ll get it done by the end of July at the latest.”
Cornyn added that lawmakers have “no choice” but to repeal ObamaCare as the healthcare law is in “meltdown” mode.
Given the opposition from Republican senators who want to preserve coverage for preexisting conditions and who support their states’ Medicaid expansions, passing a health care bill this year will not be easy. If Senate Majority Leader McConnell, who is known as a skilled tactician, is able to find 50 votes, the end product will look much different than the House passed American Health Care Act, H.R.1628.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on NAFTA trade negotiations (excerpts from yesterday’s Bipartisan Policy Center interview, C-SPAN video and transcript):
Well, one of our big objectives is to reduce our trade deficit, and there are lots of ways of doing that. The way that we think is the easiest — not just for these two countries, but for anybody with whom we partner — would be to divert to U.S. sources products they’re already buying from abroad, but from a country other than the U.S. For example, some of the agricultural products they buy come from Brazil. Well, they could just as well give us a little better market share than we have now. And that’s just one example of many.
…But within deficits, there are two categories that I would [name]. One is what I would call ‘blameless’ deficits. For example, we are not yet self-sufficient in energy so naturally we’re going to have something of a deficit caused by importation of hydrocarbons. So–and that’s an important consideration because relative to Canada, that’s more than our entire deficit comes from both hydrocarbons and electrical energy that they export to the U.S. I don’t call that blameful exports. What [are] ‘blameful’ [deficits] are things that are subsidized or are not with a level playing field or come from some other inappropriate source of behavior rather than the natural course.
…Well, those [recent informal conversations] have been trying to clear away some longstanding issues between the countries. In the case of Mexico, sugar is a principal one, and in the case of Canada, there are really two—the softwood lumber and the dairy products.
…Well, we had hoped to have it even a little earlier, but it took longer to get Congress to the point of the 90 day letter. So it would have been preferable to have it even earlier so that it was a little further separated from the Mexican election. But there have also been elections—British Columbia just had an election and some of our trade controversies are very much with British Columbia. So, there’s always somebody having an election. And my guess is that we probably have the best window from now until December or early January. Their election is midyear, and so the closer you get to it, the more complicated it will become, particularly in terms of getting the Mexican congressional approval. But we also shouldn’t forget two other things. The trade promotion authority expires July of next year, and we too have elections—the mid-term elections—and those will undoubtedly have some impact on congressional views.
“Insurers Seek Increases for Obamacare Premiums in Early Filings” This morning’s CQ Roll Call article led with:
Insurance companies in about half a dozen states have filed for premium increases ranging from 6 percent to 58 percent for 2018, citing rising medical costs and taxes as well as uncertainty surrounding the new Trump administration’s implementation of the health care law. The increases would only affect plans sold on the marketplaces established by the 2010 law (PL 111-148, PL 111-152). They are still preliminary. Federal and state insurance review rate requests throughout the summer and fall and often negotiate different increases — sometimes lower, sometimes higher. Federal subsidies also blunt the impact on consumers of high rate increases. It’s still early in rate filing season. Another set of states, including South Dakota, Arizona, Texas and Wyoming, will report rates later Thursday, and dozens more set their deadlines in June. The federal filing deadline is June 21. Not every state makes the information public early in the process.
June Treasury Bulletin released yesterday:
The treasury’s 72-page quarterly report profiles the economy and federal fiscal operations. “Researchers are figuring out just how much wealth the super-rich are hiding overseas.” This morning’s Washington Post Wonkblog reports on this May 28 research paper by Annette Alstadsæter (Norwegian University of Life Sciences), Niels Johannesen (University of Copenhagen), and Gabriel Zucman (UC Berkeley and NBER).
This paper attempts to estimate the size and distribution of tax evasion in rich countries. We combine stratified random audits—the key source used to study tax evasion so far—with new micro-data leaked from two large offshore financial institutions: HSBC Switzerland (“Swiss leaks”) and Mossack Fonseca (“Panama Papers”). We match these data to population-wide wealth records in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. We find that tax evasion rises sharply with wealth, a phenomenon that random audits fail to capture. On average about 3% of personal taxes are evaded in Scandinavia, but this figure rises to about 30% in the top 0.01% of the wealth distribution, a group that includes households with more than $40 million in net wealth. A simple model of the supply of tax evasion services can explain why evasion rises steeply with wealth. Taking tax evasion into account increases the rise in inequality seen in tax data since the 1970s markedly, highlighting the need to move beyond tax data to capture income and wealth at the top, even in countries where tax compliance is generally high. We also find that after reducing tax evasion—by using tax amnesties—tax evaders do not legally avoid taxes more. This result suggests that fighting tax evasion can be an effective way to collect more tax revenue from the ultra-wealthy.
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