Republicans are in revolt. Economists on the left and right are deeply skeptical. President Trump’s top economic adviser resigned rather than be party to it. The culprit: tariffs, and specifically the president’s decision to slap duties on imported steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent).
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We think of today’s Washington as being rigidly divided along party lines on nearly every issue. But a bloc of Democrats in the Senate just joined with Republicans and the Trump administration on a bill that would lighten some restrictions on banks imposed by the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, one of President Obama’s signature policy achievements. Meanwhile, some congressional Republicans are considering legislation that would stop President Trump’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which several Democrats and labor leaders have publicly supported.
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Al Capone was busted for tax evasion. Leona Helmsley was, too. But gangsters and entitled millionaires aren’t the only ones who hold something back from the tax man. Each year, Americans of all stripes underpay the IRS by hundreds of billions, aided by the fact that the agency lacks the resources to catch all the cheaters.
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Late last year, graduate students watched as legislators in the House debated giving them a hefty new tax bill: A version of the GOP tax plan proposed to treat tuition waivers as taxable income. Although that plan was later dropped, Congress is once again considering legislation that could affect graduate students’ bottom lines. And the federal government is considering ending some of its student loan forgiveness programs, which could raise the economic barrier to entering certain public service professions and leave social workers, teachers and other people in public-service fields that require graduate degrees paying thousands of dollars more for their education.
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Why couldn’t we all just get along?
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Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
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In early April, a paleontology graduate student, Robert DePalma, published a major find in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and hyped the discovery in The New Yorker. Locked in layers of North Dakota rock, he had found an impressive collection of ancient fish, microorganisms and plants that date to the same time period as the infamous global extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. That extinction is widely believed to have been caused by an asteroid impact, and DePalma’s site seems to offer further evidence supporting that theory.
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Happy Equal Pay Day! (Or, as I like to call it, Women’s New Year.) Today is the day that marks roughly how far into 2018 women had to work to earn a salary equal to what men got the year before.1 We’d throw a parade and street fair, but we were too busy working to organize one.
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Where is the loudest place in America? You might think New York City, or a major airport hub, or a concert you have suddenly become too old to appreciate.
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If you thought all the remaining primary debates were going to be one-night affairs, think again. On Sunday, billionaire activist Tom Steyer got his fourth qualifying poll thanks to an early-state survey from Nevada, which means 11 candidates have now met the polling and donor thresholds for the Democrats’ fourth debate. And Tulsi Gabbard has announced that, based on one subset of respondents, she got a third qualifying poll this weekend, but the Democratic National Committee has confirmed that it is looking at different set of respondents and the poll will not count for her.
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