Congress repeals individual mandate

Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The first hearing of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee kicked off today for the 118 th Congress. The hearing, The State of Transportation Infrastructure and Supply Chain Challenges , featured new Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) and Ranking Member Rick Laursen (D-CA). The supply chain, labor, and regulation of freight rail, America’s best scoring infrastructure which drove $1 trillion to the US economy in 2021, were topics of the hearing. Roughly half of the $1.2 trillion of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) falls under the jurisdiction of this committee. Chairman Graves laid out priorities of the committee, noting that America’s transportation network is essential and integral to American competitiveness, movement of goods and people, and quality of life. He noted how Covid-19 exposed the vulnerabilities of America’s transportation networks and was exacerbated by misguided regulation. A … [Read more...] about Freight Rail Pushes Past Pandemic Driving Billions To US Economy

Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin What Women Need to Know About SECURE Act 2.0 On December 23, 2022, while most of the country was out of the office enjoying a nice holiday break, Congress passed an update to the retirement bill known as the SECURE Act, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act (now referred to as SECURE Act 2.0). While the original SECURE Act, passed nearly three years prior in December 2019, had a net negative impact by eliminating the “stretch IRA” (the ability for a non-spouse beneficiary of a qualified retirement account to take distributions over their lifetime), SECURE Act 2.0 had an overall net positive impact, making numerous small changes to retirement plan savings rules in an effort to encourage Americans to save more for their retirement. In total, there are over 90 provisions in SECURE Act 2.0. Below, I highlight a few revisions that are particularly meaningful for women. Why focus on women, in … [Read more...] about What Women Need To Know About SECURE Act 2.0

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das If you thought the good news stopped with the Budget 2023 slashing the tax burden on individuals, think again. The budget proposals are also likely to help stop the interest rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of India that have been raising your EMIs since last year. The Budget’s fiscal rectitude would be music to the ears of the members of RBI’s interest rate-setting panel. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman not only met her deficit target for the current fiscal year and announced a lower target for the next but she also said that she would stick to the medium-term aim of below 4.5 percent of the GDP. The RBI’s monetary policy committee, which has been waging a war on red-hot inflation over the last year, is widely expected to raise interest rates by another 25 basis points when it meets February 6-8. The panel has raised interest rates by 225 basis points since April 2022. In October, the central bank failed to meet its inflation mandate after … [Read more...] about How Budget 2023 paves the way for RBI to pause rate hike after February

Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Harvard economist Raj Chetty is doing something remarkable, and it ought to be a model for how the government and the private sector can improve the lives of American citizens. His approach isn't political. It’s pragmatic . Even more admirable: he’s willing to face irksome facts about how inequality of opportunity is almost physically rooted in neighborhoods . It’s all about zip codes. You are who you are, economically and educationally, to a great degree because of where you live . Once you land in a zip code, it will launch you into new opportunities, or it will limit you. Where you’re going depends more than we want to admit on where you are right now. Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard. He focuses on economic inequality and social mobility: the ability of each generation of a family to enjoy a quality of life better than the previous one. Multiple studies have found that the U.S. is … [Read more...] about A Revolutionary Move For A Better Future

Scott Jensen, a medical doctor who previously served in the Minnesota State Senate and ran for governor as a Republican, is being investigated for the sixth time since 2020 by the state’s medical board after questioning COVID-19 protocols. Jensen says the complaints against him are politically motivated and are coming from people who disagree with his politics — not from actual patients. “This is all about raw politics, this is about raw power, this is about punishment,” he said. “There’s an opportunity for dissenting voices to be crushed, literally extinguished. If it can happen to me it can certainly happen to you. It can happen to any of us.” Scott Jensen, a medical doctor, former state senator and former Republican Minnesota gubernatorial candidate, said the state is attempting to revoke his medical license after he questioned certain components of the response to COVID-19. The Minnesota Board of Medical Practice is investigating complaints against Jensen to determine … [Read more...] about Ex-GOP Candidate Probed By Dem AG Could Lose His Medical License Over COVID ‘Disinformation’

Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin On January 20, the day President Joe Biden was inaugurated, Luke Scarmazzo, who is serving a 22-year sentence in federal prison for operating a medical cannabis dispensary in California, realized that he was going to remain in prison. During the final days of the Trump Administration, he was told that he would be pardoned and released. “When I saw Biden getting sworn in, I knew that it wasn’t gonna happen,” Scarmazzo says during a phone call from Yazoo City, MS-based FCI Yazoo City, where he is currently incarcerated. For some reason, Scarmazzo’s case wasn’t approved at the last minute. After eight years of lobbying the Obama and Trump Administrations, Scarmazzo now has to start all over with the Biden Administration. Scarmazzo and his business partner, Ricardo Montes, opened California Healthcare Collective medical cannabis dispensary in 2004 in Modesto, CA. Though their  business was legal under California’s … [Read more...] about The Inside Story Of A Trump Pardon Gone Wrong