Skip to content
7
“The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause,” Reuters reports.
$86 to $92
“A little more than a year after President Trump slapped a 20% tariff on imported washing machines, new research finds that American shoppers have been the ones to pay the price,” NBC News reports. “A study conducted by two researchers at the University of Chicago and a Federal Reserve Board Governor found that washers cost an average of 12% more after the imposition of the tariffs, or roughly $86 to $92 more per appliance.”
12%
A new Monmouth poll finds just 12% of Americans say that their family has benefited a great deal from recent growth in the U.S. economy and another 31% say they have received some benefit from the economic upturn. A majority, though, say they have been helped either not much (27%) or not at all (27%) from the nation’s macroeconomic growth.
5%
President Trump “said he will ask all cabinet departments to cut their budgets by 5 percent next year, after the federal budget deficit swelled to its highest level since 2012 during the first full fiscal year of his presidency,” Bloomberg reports.
$100,000,000,000
“The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives,” the New York Times reports.
“Believe me: We’re in a bubble right now. And the only thing that looks good is the stock market — but if you raise interest rates even a little bit, that’s going to come crashing down. We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.”
— President Trump, quoted by the Washington Post, during the first presidential debate in September 2016.
14%
Bloomberg: “Trump mentions the stock market almost daily in tweets or public remarks, taking direct credit for record highs by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and other indices. But only about 14 percent of U.S. families directly own stocks, an asset class dominated by the country’s top earners, according to the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the president has also rolled back efforts to expand retirement savings options to more middle-class and low-income workers.”
#248
The Forbes list of 400 richest Americans shows that the billionaire-in-chief’s fortune fell by $600 million to $3.1 billion. As a result he dropped to #248 on the list, after coming in at #156 last year, CNN Money reports.
3%
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Reuters the U.S. economy won’t achieve the Trump administration’s 3 percent growth goal this year and not until all of its tax, regulatory, trade and energy policies are fully in place. Said Ross: “The Congress has been slow-walking everything. We don’t even have half the people in place.”
0.7%
The Commerce Department said the U.S. economy barely grew in the first quarter of 2017, expanding at an annual rate of only 0.7 percent. Associated Press: “The slowdown primarily reflected slower consumer spending, which grew by just 0.3 percent. That was the poorest showing in more than seven years.”
