The Trump administration has heavily promoted the larger tax refunds expected this year as a selling point for Republicans in the midterm elections, but two conservative economists refuted that narrative on Tuesday, arguing that, in aggregate, the Trump administration’s policies were, in effect, a tax increase.

Signed into law by President Donald Trump last year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act extended a number of tax cuts implemented during his first term – tax cuts that largely benefit the wealthiest Americans, and at the expense of social safety net programs like Medicaid and food assistance. The savings for “the average American,” however, were more than offset by the price hikes caused by Trump’s tariff policy, conservative economists Phil Gramm and Michael Solon argued Tuesday in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal.

A billionaire real estate magnate demanded that the ultra-rich be "praised and thanked" in an earnings call reported by Politico on Tuesday — and compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's calls to "tax the rich" to racial slurs.

“I must say that I consider the phrase tax the rich — quote tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’” said Steve Roth, who runs Vornado Realty Trust.

A longtime Trump biographer says a murky financial rescue involving Jeffrey Epstein may explain why President Donald Trump has never released his tax returns. Journalist Michael Wolff, speaking on The Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head, recalled how Epstein allegedly helped Trump escape more than $1 billion in debt in the early 1990s by engineering loan forgiveness — and then, crucially, a way to avoid paying taxes on it. Wolff said forgiven debt normally counts as taxable income, but claimed Epstein advised Trump on a loophole that kept the IRS at bay, a maneuver Epstein later suggested was a key reason Trump’s returns have remained hidden. The story, Wolff said, sheds unsettling light on Trump’s decades-long secrecy — and on his financial entanglements with the now-disgraced financier.

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