Senate Democrats, with backing from the White House, yesterday proposed a plan to avert the sequester by cutting $120 billion. One quarter of the savings come from eliminating direct payments under the farm bill.The package offered by Senate Democratic leaders is dead on arrival. A sequester gets all the deficit reduction from spending, but this plan gets half its savings from tax increases. Moreover, the proposed savings would not be comparable to the sequester cuts. Whereas sequestration would eliminate spending this year, the numbers in the proposed plan are multi-year numbers.
The tax numbers are somewhat suspect. A Congressional Budget Office study from July 2012 shows that the effective tax rate for those taxpayers in the top 1 per...
What You Need to Know Today: Cattle futures extended their sharp selloff Friday as weakening cash cattle prices, deteriorating feedlot profitability, and reduced packer demand continued to weigh on the market. The inability of futures to sustain a rally following last week's bullish Cattle on...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
