President Rejects Repatriation
WH states opposition to tax "holiday" for multinational corporations. Reuters: "President Barack Obama does not support the idea of a corporate tax repatriation 'holiday' that some Republicans in Congress have said could help boost the coffers of the dwindling Highway Trust Fund ... 'The president does not support and has never supported a voluntary repatriation holiday because it would give large tax breaks to a very small number of companies that have most aggressively shifted profits, and in many cases, jobs, overseas,' White House spokesman Jay Carney said."
Bipartisan duo propose gas tax hike to shore up highway trust fund. The Hill: "Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Wednesday unveiled the first bipartisan Senate proposal to raise the gas tax, broaching a dangerous political issue that lawmakers have avoided for years. The Murphy-Corker plan would raise the gas tax by 12 cents over the next two years, raising $164 billion over the next decade and covering the shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund. It would index the gas tax to inflation, pegging it to the Consumer Price Index, to avoid future shortfalls ... Murphy argued the proposal has the support of labor unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which have campaigned together in favor of a gas tax increase."
House Republicans scrap idea to pay for highway trust fund with postal service cuts. Roll Call: "The House is now considering other offsets for the troubled trust fund, due to run short of money this summer, including another round of pension changes and increases in Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation premiums. 'The proposal to end six-day [mail delivery] was not well received by a large portion of the Republican conference and appears to be dead,' said a senior House Republican aide."
Fed Steps Back
Fed curtails monetary stimulus. The Hill: "The Federal Reserve stuck with its slow exit from its stimulus project, trimming yet again the size of its monthly bond purchases to $35 billion. The $10 billion trim to its quantitative easing came as the Fed said the economy had 'picked up recently' after a harsh winter. However, the Fed noted in its policy statement that unemployment was still elevated and the housing market slow, and household spending and business investment were on the upswing."
"Is the Fed Complacent?" asks Bloomberg edit board: "...what are the Fed and other regulators doing to prepare for the next surge of financial instability? Not enough. Regulators are building a financial early-warning system, but it's far from complete. Yellen says Fed officials are watching indicators of risk-taking -- such as the amount of borrowed money, or leverage, investors are using. If they have good measures, they should share them with the public: The ones they've published to date are far from comprehensive."
Breakfast Sides
Sen. Bernie Sanders tells National Journal he's "looking forward to running for president of the United States": "...perhaps the most important question is whether Democrats will, or should, give serious consideration to Sanders's central theory: that their party could successfully woo working-class white conservatives ... 'The word, the "Left," I don't exactly even know what it means,' he tells me at one point in Burlington. 'Do people believe we should expand Social Security and not cut it? Yeah, they do. Do people believe we should have a massive jobs program? Yeah, they do. Is this the "Left"? ' The workers-of-the-world-unite attitude explains why Sanders recently delivered his stump speech to audiences in several states in the Deep South: He truly thinks it should be possible to apply the strategy he has mastered in Vermont to a broader swath of the country."
Obamacare is a bargain. The Hill: "The Department of Health and Human Services released a report Wednesday which found about 3.2 million people are paying less than $100 per month for health insurance thanks to subsidies on ObamaCare's federally run exchanges ... HHS says almost 70 percent of people who receive federal assistance to pay for their premiums are paying less than $100 a month and 46 percent of those people are paying less than $50 a month."
Rupert Murdoch pens pro-immigration reform WSJ oped: "Like others who want comprehensive immigration reform, I worried that Mr. Cantor's loss would be misconstrued and make Congress reluctant to tackle this urgent need. That would be the wrong lesson and an undesirable national consequence of this single, local election result. People are looking for leadership—those who stand for something and offer a vision for how to take America forward and keep our nation economically competitive. One of the most immediate ways to revitalize our economy is by passing immigration reform."
