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The House passed a measure to delay ObamaCare’s health insurance tax for two years and expand Health Savings Accounts, part of a GOP effort to try to lower premiums, The Hill reported. The bill, which passed 242-176, is part of a Republican effort to blunt Democratic attacks on the GOP for rising premiums — a key argument in the midterm elections this year. The health insurance tax has been criticized by Republicans and some Democrats for driving up premiums. “This is a flawed tax that gets passed onto American families,” Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) said. Democrats said that the measures would have no substantial impact on premiums, and instead pointed to Republican efforts to protect themselves in the midterms. The health insurance tax has already been suspended for 2019. This bill suspends the tax for 2020 and 2021 as well. The measure also expands Health Savings Accounts, tax-free ways for people to save for health expenses, and expands the number of ObamaCare enrollees eligible to purchase lower premium “catastrophic” plans with high deductibles.

President Donald Trump said that the U.S. and the European Union should eliminate all tariffs, barriers and subsidies, with the bloc’s trade chiefs set to present him with proposals in that direction in a crunch meeting at the White House later today, Bloomberg reported. “I have an idea for them. Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies!” Trump said in a tweet. “That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade! Hope they do it, we are ready - but they won’t!” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom are due to meet with President Trump in Washington on Wednesday. They plan to signal the bloc’s willingness to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with the U.S. on manufactured goods, or a so-called plurilateral sectoral agreement between all major car exporters that would cut or eliminate tariffs on automobiles globally. The overtures are a last-ditch attempt to dissuade him from imposing tariffs on European car exports to the U.S. in what could deal a serious blow to the 28-nation bloc’s economy. The Stoxx 600 Automobiles & Parts Index fell by 1.4 percent at 1:03 p.m. in Brussels ahead of the meeting. “We are here to explain and find out how to prevent a trade war,” Juncker said, adding that he’s not overly optimistic. The EU is prepared to retaliate “immediately” if talks fail, he warned. The commission is preparing a list of retaliatory measures on American goods worth $20 billion should the U.S. impose car tariffs, Malmstrom said. “It would be more general, like farming goods, machines, high-technology products and others,” she said.

An economics professor sparked widespread online outrage and ridicule over the weekend after writing an op-ed piece for Forbes titled “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money,” The Washington Post reported. As of this writing, the piece had been removed from Forbes' website. In the piece, Panos Mourdoukoutas of Long Island University argued that recent changes in the worlds of technology and commerce have rendered libraries mostly obsolete. The ubiquity of “third places” such as neighborhood coffee shops has diminished libraries' use as a community gathering space, he said. Streaming services have eliminated the need for library-based TV and movie rentals, and e-books have “turned physical books into collector’s items, effectively eliminating the need for library borrowing services.” Since public libraries are financed with public dollars, Mourdoukoutas argued that replacing them with brick-and-mortar Amazon bookstores would save taxpayers money. Mourdoukoutas’s piece is notable less for the arguments it contains than for sparking a backlash that was loud and fierce. It’s worth considering why so many people reacted to Mourdoukoutas’s op-ed the way they did. Fortunately, data from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) offers some clues. As it turns out, lots of people use their local libraries. In 2016, “more than 171 million registered users, representing over half of the nearly 311 million Americans who lived within a public library service area, visited public libraries over 1.35 billion times,” the IMLS reports. For the typical library, that works out to about 4.4 visits for every single man, woman and child living in the region served by the library.

President Donald Trump signaled for a second straight day his frustration with the Federal Reserve’s policy of gradually raising interest rates, saying that it would undermine his campaign to boost U.S. economic growth and reduce trade deficits, The Wall Street Journal reported. In tweets on Friday, President Trump said that the Fed’s efforts hurt the U.S. economic expansion, and he accused China and Europe of manipulating their currencies to hurt the U.S. on trade. The tweets came shortly after CNBC broadcast an interview in which the president said he was prepared to impose U.S. tariffs on $500 billion worth of imports from China as part of his push to narrow U.S. trade deficits. In a portion of the interview, the president said that he wasn’t happy about Fed rate increases. The central bank’s campaign to slowly raise interest rates “hurts all that we have done,” President Trump wrote. “The U.S. should be allowed to recapture what was lost due to illegal currency manipulation and BAD Trade Deals. Debt coming due & we are raising rates — Really?” In effect, President Trump signaled his desire to enlist the Fed in his broader trade campaign. Higher interest rates in the U.S. could raise the value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies, which would make it harder to narrow the trade deficit. A stronger greenback makes U.S. exports relatively more expensive on world markets. President Trump regards the trade deficit as an important scorecard of economic vitality, though most economists say it isn’t.

State auditors have told a French village near the Spanish border that it is “too rich” to continue taxing residents and should cancel council and property taxes this year, The Telegraph reported. Le Perthus, a community of 586 people, earns more than £700,000 a year from parking fees alone, equivalent to nearly £1,200 per inhabitant. People from the surrounding region park in the village while they cross the border on foot to shop in Spain, where food, clothes and household goods are cheaper. The village council has a surplus of well over £1 million in its coffers, while its current spending is minimal. Accordingly, the regional audit office has advised it to abandon this year’s local taxes because it has “an abundance of resources that are not being used.” André Pezziardi, head of the Occitanie Audit Office, said, “We concluded that local taxation should be reduced to zero for council and property taxes because the contributions of citizens must have a quid pro quo, and that of course is expenditure.” Last year, the council spent less than £5,000 of £240,000 earmarked for public facilities because the mayor and councillors failed to reach agreement on budgets.