Former President Donald Trump’s historic comeback marked the culmination of not just his own efforts, but those of his many surrogates and allies who will likely join him in the White House.
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Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary under the Trump administration, said Thursday that he is organizing a group to buy TikTok as a bill proceeds through Congress that would force the popular social media app to either be sold or be banned.
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The federal budget deficit hit an all-time high of $3.1 trillion in the 2020 budget year, more than double the previous record, as the coronavirus pandemic shrank revenues and sent spending soaring.
The Trump administration reported Friday that the deficit for the budget year that ended on Sept. 30 was three times the size of last year’s deficit of $984 billion. It was also $2 trillion higher than the administration had estimated in February, before the pandemic hit.
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Nearly 1.1 million coronavirus relief payments totaling some $1.4 billion went to dead people, a government watchdog reported Thursday.
More than 130 million so-called economic impact payments were sent to taxpayers as part of the $2.4 trillion coronavirus relief package enacted in March. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, cited the number of erroneous payments to deceased taxpayers in its report on the government programs.
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The Los Angeles Lakers received and then returned a forgivable loan of roughly $4.6 million under a federal program designed to help small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.
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The price of a barrel of oil briefly fell below zero dollars this week, demonstrating clearly what happens when there is no longer demand for a product or commodity, as tens of millions of Americans are leaving cars in their driveways and airlines are largely grounded. All around the world, it’s much the same situation as the global economy has collapsed in the wake of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
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U.S. Treasury Steven Mnuchin says he will visit China next week for two days of talks to end the year-long trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
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by Chuck Ross The Justice Department on Friday backed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a battle with Congress over the release of President Donald Trump’s tax returns. In a 33-page opinion, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven A. Engel, said a request made by the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal on April 3 for Trump’s tax returns “raised a serious risk of abuse.” “The Chairman’s request that Treasury turn over the President’s tax returns, for the apparent purpose of making them public, amounted to an unprecedented use of the Committee’s authority and raised a serious risk of abuse,” wrote Engel. Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked Mnuchin for the past six years of Trump’s tax returns as well as records from eight of his companies. One of his arguments was that the returns would serve a legislative purpose of some sort. “This request is about policy, not politics; my preparations were made on my own track and timeline, entirely independent of other activities in Congress and the Administration,” Neal said. He said in the request that he wanted to investigate the IRS’s policy regarding to auditing of presidents’ and vice-presidents’ tax returns.…
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