A couple of minutes, Kevin?
Yeah, I promised this morning, remember? So happy to. I hope I'm not in Tom's shot. Am I?
What's the importance of the big beautiful bill getting passed?
Well, I think that we're almost to the finish line. I think that we expect that the Senate bill will pass tonight and then the House will be able to give it to the president to sign by the 4th of July. And that's always been his objective and we're highly optimistic that we're going to pull that off.
Director Hassett, the president has been saying that he is going to set a tariff rate on Japan. He just posted that on his social. Can you tell us what that rate is?
President Trump is going to finalize the frameworks that we've negotiated with a whole bunch of countries after we get the big, beautiful bill passed. So I would expect you'll see a lot more news about that after the bill passed.
After 4th of July, maybe?
Yeah.
What's the status of trade talks with Australia? I know you're close with the ambassador. Have they been making progress or have they stalled?
Yeah, I'm not going to talk about the individual discussions, but I know that Jamison Greer and Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent have been leading the trade negotiations with different countries and they're working 24/7 to get as many frameworks finalized as soon as possible.
Do you think the Australia deal will be done by July 9th?
You'll have to talk to Jamison Greer about that.
On the big, beautiful bill, Republicans voted this morning to move forward with current policy baseline in terms of scoring the bill, which enables them not to count the $3.8 trillion cost of extending the tax cuts. Are you concerned at all that Democrats might try to choose a similar procedural maneuver later on and not count in expensive policies that they support?
Well, I think that what Republicans have been trying to get forever and ever is symmetry. So that things like if spending goes into a baseline, then the baseline is there forever. And so the point is that the baseline should be symmetric. So however we treat taxes is how we should treat spending and that's why I think there's been so much support in the Senate for this policy change.
And I'm going to go around, I promise.
Has the president ruled out another 90-day pause -- apologies if this has been asked before, but has he ruled that out tentatively? After the July 9th deadline, is that just locked in what tariff rates are going to be?
I don't have a comment on that right now.
It was suggested last week that we saw with China, the agreement was a de-escalation of the back and forth with both countries. Can you speak to that? And do you consider that still going on. Are we still --
We're very pleased with the progress we've been making with China and we're very pleased to see how quickly the licenses that we discussed are starting to be granted to our firms, and we haven't seen disruptions that could have happened had China not come to the table.
Has the President ended talks with Japan?
Excuse me?
Has the president ended trade talks with Japan?
I'm not familiar with them. Nothing is over.
He just posted on --
I know what he just posted, but they'll still be discussions right up to the end. Even if we get a framework, then there's still going to be things to finalize.
On China, given the fact that some Chinese companies are still buying Iranian Oil, is that fact that China has not stopped buying Iranian oil despite the White House sanctions, it's going to affect trade talks with China?
I'm not going to go into China and Iranian oil right now, sorry. This lady just said -- I said I would move from left to right, but now she's [Inaudible] I just promised I would go this way, so trying to be systematic. So yeah.
Sure. I saw that you confirmed this morning that the US will resume trade talks with Canada. Does that mean that the president will not impose tariffs unilaterally on Canada anymore as previously warned?
We've made lots of progress in our discussions with Canada. I met with the president at the G-7 meeting up in Canada and spoke at length about trade with the prime minister and we're looking forward to more talks, I think. Yeah.
With the new trade deal, China [Inaudible] India and the big, bill coming up [Inaudible] this week, have there been any more discussions about the Internal Revenue Service and possibly abolishing the income tax for certain Americans?
I think right now, we're focused on the big, beautiful bill and really excited to see that it's going to get passed by the fourth. And then when it does pass, right, we're going to see an explosion in revenue because the CBO score says it's only 1.8 percent growth delivered by the bill. We're highly confident it will be at least three percent growth, maybe even more.
And so, yeah, the Internal Revenue Service is going to have a lot of regulating to write -- regulations to write and a lot of revenue to collect. I'll take one last question. I said I would go this way.
What would you say to any House Republicans who may still be on the fence considering voting no on [Inaudible] on Wednesday or Thursday? What would your final pitch to them be?
That if you look at this bill, it's the biggest spending cut in history. It's the biggest tax cut in history. If we don't pass the bill, then we're going to go almost immediately into a recession. It also secures the border and achieves all sorts of objectives that the president talked about on the campaign.
And so I would counsel people very much against voting against the bill and I don't expect that there are going to be many people who do that because the bill makes so much sense. So thank you guys so much for your attention. Yeah.