WASHINGTON – The White House will hold a press briefing Friday afternoon with press secretary Sarah Sanders.
The briefing is scheduled to start at 2 p.m., EST - you can watch it LIVE here on ClickOnDetroit.com. Here are some other headlines from around Washington:
Recommended Videos
Trump pledges biggest tax cuts ever as Senate paves way
President Donald Trump promised tax cuts Friday “which will be the biggest in the history of our country!” following Senate passage of a $4 trillion budget that lays the groundwork for Republicans’ promised tax legislation.
Republicans hope to push the first tax overhaul in three decades through Congress by year’s end, an ambitious goal that would fulfill multiple campaign promises but could run aground over any number of disputes. Failure could cost the GOP dearly in next year’s midterm elections.
The budget plan passed on a near party-line vote late Thursday includes rules that will allow Republicans to pass tax legislation through the Senate without Democratic votes and without fear of a Democratic filibuster. Nonetheless, the GOP’s narrow 52-48 majority in the Senate will be difficult for leadership to navigate, as illustrated by the Republicans’ multiple failures to pass legislation repealing and replacing “Obamacare.”
The final vote on the budget was 51-49 with deficit hawk Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky the lone opposing GOP vote.
Trump insisted over Twitter Friday that Paul would be with him in the end on taxes, even though the senator has been critical of the tax package as it’s emerged thus far.
Trump wrote, “The Budget passed late last night, 51 to 49. We got ZERO Democrat votes with only Rand Paul (he will vote for Tax Cuts) voting against........This now allows for the passage of large scale Tax Cuts (and Reform), which will be the biggest in the history of our country!”
The House has passed a different budget but House Republicans signaled they would simply accept the Senate plan to avoid any potential of delaying the tax measure.
“I look forward to swift passage and to working with the president on tax reform,” House Budget Committee Chairman Diane Black, R-Tenn., said Friday.
Republicans are looking for accomplishments following an embarrassing drought of legislative achievements despite controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House. Republican lawmakers publicly admit that failure on taxes would be politically devastating with control of the House and Senate at stake in next year’s midterm elections.
“It would be a complete disaster,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said after the final budget vote.
But Republicans are split on taxes. A restive rump of House Republicans from high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California staunchly oppose the tax plan’s proposed elimination of the federal deduction for state and local taxes. They maintain it would hurt low- to mid-income taxpayers and subject them to being taxed twice.
Their vocal opposition has led Republican leaders in Congress like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, who heads the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, to hear out the fractious GOP members and seek a compromise with them.
At the same time, the White House is making overtures to conservative Democrats in the House and Democratic senators from states that Trump won in the 2016 election. Most heavily courted have been Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. The trio dined this week at the home of daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both top advisers to Trump.
But Manchin said after Thursday’s vote, “I fear that passage of this budget today will make it difficult to pass bipartisan tax reform in the coming weeks.” In his conversations with Trump, Manchin said, “we have discussed our shared goal of ensuring any tax-reform package passes with both Republican and Democratic votes, and focuses on providing tax relief for working Americans. The current tax-reform proposal ... does not reflect my conversations with the president.”
The Democrats were excluded from the drafting of the tax blueprint, and they continue to demand that any tax-cutting plan not add to the mounting $20 trillion national debt. The newly-adopted Senate budget plan provides for $1.5 trillion over 10 years in debt-financed tax cuts, busting earlier Republican pledges of strict fiscal discipline.
The money would be used for the tax plan’s cut in the corporate tax rate from 36 percent to 20 percent, reduced taxes for most individuals, and the repeal of inheritance taxes on multimillion-dollar estates. The standard deduction would be doubled, to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for families, the number of tax brackets would shrink from seven to three, and the child tax credit would be increased.
Trump and the Republicans pitch the plan as a boon to the middle class and a spark to economic growth and jobs. Democrats charge it mainly would benefit wealthy individuals — like Trump — and big corporations.
Uninsured rate up to 12.3 percent amid Obamacare turmoil
The number of U.S. adults without health insurance is up nearly 3.5 million this year, as rising premiums and political turmoil over “Obamacare” undermine coverage gains that drove the nation’s uninsured rate to a historic low.
That finding is based on the latest installment of a major survey, released Friday. The Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index asks a random sample of 500 people each day whether they have health insurance.
The survey found that the uninsured rate among adults was 12.3 percent during the period from July 1-Sept. 30, an increase of 1.4 percentage points since the end of last year. The increase in the number of uninsured is more striking because it comes at a time of economic growth and low unemployment.
The annual sign-up season for subsidized private insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act starts Nov. 1, but it may not make much of a difference.
President Donald Trump has stopped federal payments that reimburse insurers for lower copays and deductibles that the Obama-era law requires them to provide to people with modest incomes. His administration slashed the advertising budget for 2018 sign-ups, cut the length of open enrollment in half, and sharply reduced federal grants to groups that help consumers navigate the process.
“The number of uninsured Americans likely will continue to rise,” the Gallup-Sharecare analysis noted, unless Trump and Congress take steps to stabilize insurance markets. A bipartisan bill to restart the canceled insurer payments faces opposition from conservatives and Trump has sent mixed signals.
While “Obamacare” remains politically divisive, its coverage expansion helped about 20 million people get health insurance, bringing the uninsured rate to a historic low. Continued progress seems unlikely now.
Next year’s premiums for plans sold on the health law’s marketplaces are expected to increase significantly in many communities, and insurer participation is down sharply, with about half of U.S. counties having only one carrier.
Although consumers who are eligible for ACA subsidies are shielded from price hikes, many who buy individual plans get no financial assistance from the government. All told, more than 17 million people purchase their own policies.
Graphic shows Gallup poll of U.S. adults who say they lack health insurance.
Independent experts who reviewed the Gallup-Sharecare findings said they appear to confirm other available evidence.
“The results make sense and they track with the results of other rapid surveys,” said Matthew Buettgens, a senior research analyst with the Urban Institute health policy center. “No one is expecting this open-enrollment period to increase enrollment.”
GOP health economist Gail Wilensky said the overall direction of the Gallup-Sharecare results seems reasonable, but she’ll await confirmation from government surveys that take longer to produce results, but dig deeper.
“The only thing most Republicans in Congress seem to agree on is that they don’t like the ACA,” she said. “Hard to build an alternative legislative package without a sounder basis for policy and with the very narrow majority in the Senate.”
Except for seniors covered by Medicare, the Gallup-Sharecare survey found that the uninsured rate increased among all major demographic groups.
The loss of coverage was concentrated among middle-aged adults, with the uninsured rate rising by 1.8 percentage points among those 35-64 since the end of 2016. Households making less than $36,000 a year saw their uninsured rate go up by 1.7 percentage points.
Among Hispanics, the rate increased by 1.6 percentage points, and among blacks the increase was 1.5 percentage points.
The Gallup-Sharecare results are based on telephone interviews conducted July 1-Sept. 30, with a random sample of 45,743 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of error is plus or minus 1 percentage point.