Full story
Profits, scrutiny, and funds
U.S. President Donald Trump has earned billions of dollars from family business ventures and investments over his past 16 months in the White House, according to research by watchdog groups and media outlets.
“U.S. President Donald Trump has earned billions of dollars”
Will Ragland, vice-president for research at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., told CBC News, "I think that this is an open, pay-for-play, corrupt presidency," and said there is "no historical precedent for the amount of personal cash he has brought in".
The White House insists Trump has done nothing that violates any U.S. laws or ethics rules, while the article says updated trackers put the wealth amassed by Trump, his family and his companies even higher.
The reporting also ties the scrutiny to disclosures about stock trades by Trump's personal investment advisers, and notes that Trump's new $1.776B Anti-Weaponization Fund is described as a $1.8 billion US taxpayer-funded pot to compensate people the White House claims were victims of the Biden administration's "weaponization" of the justice system.
The article says the Internal Revenue Service is "forever barred and precluded" from pursuing any pending tax claims against Trump, his family and his businesses, and quotes Ragland saying the "payment portal" effect is open and that "he and his sons are very open about it."
Minimum tax withdrawal
Donald Trump signed the end of the minimum taxes on American multinationals by withdrawing the United States from an international agreement on minimum taxation for multinationals that provided for a 15% rate.
The European Union expressed its regrets, and the European Commission proposed engaging in dialogue with the new American tax administration after Trump said the agreement had "no effect in the United States."
The agreement, concluded in 2021 under the OECD, aimed to curb tax competition among states, and the OECD said the major tax reform was supposed to bring in more than $200 billion in tax revenue each year.
The reporting says the corporate tax in the United States fell from 35% to 21% during the major tax-cut program enacted during Trump's first term in 2017, but that the effective rate has been around 9% since 2018 versus 16% in 2014, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Alex Cobham, head of the Tax Justice Network, said in a statement, "Not only has Trump just killed the OECD's modest tax reform, but he also threatens to destroy everything that has been built in a century."
Fed independence and tariffs
The Ouest-France report describes Trump waging a showdown with the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) and says the Fed announced it would hold its policy rate range at 4.25% to 4.50% on the evening of Wednesday, July 30.
“hold its policy rate range at 4.25% to 4.50%”
It says Trump pressed for a rate cut to 1… and that he insulted Jerome Powell on his Truth Social network by calling someone a moron, threatened to remove him from office, and paid a surprise visit to the renovation site of the Fed headquarters in Washington.
The article says the Fed is independent and is tasked with managing inflation and the unemployment rate, and it adds that with inflation relatively kept at 2.7% against an objective of 2% and unemployment fairly low at 4.7%, the Fed sees no need to shake up the policy apparatus.
It also links the debate to tariffs, saying tariff revenues have quadrupled from $7.9 billion to $27 billion according to the U.S. Treasury Department, while noting that nothing says they will be sustainable.
The report says the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the “Great and Beautiful Law” would lead to a debt increase of $3.4 trillion by 2034, and that for 2025 it projects an economy of $200 billion but a $470 billion drop in revenues, as Christophe Blot is quoted in the piece.
