Here’s the plan: Gov. Bobby Jindal, seeking to breathe life into his presidential campaign, is taking a sharply different approach to tax policy than his Republican rivals, The Wall Street Journal reports. The presidential contender plans to unveil a tax plan today in Iowa with a goal of making all citizens pay at least some federal income tax. That puts Jindal at the center of a long-running debate over who foots the cost of federal spending. Jindal’s plan seeks to compress the current seven tax brackets into three, with those in the lowest rung paying a 2% rate. It would also eliminate most deductions, including those that allow millions of Americans to pay nothing in federal income taxes. Read the full story.
The bottom of the barrel: A year after oil sank into a bear market, Bloomberg reports the industry is still hunkering down for a long period of low prices, with Europe’s biggest producer seeing only the first glimpses of a recovery. In the past five months, U.S. production sank by 590,000 barrels a day, or more than 6%. The bad news: Drillers are cutting costs with a speed and brutality not seen in decades, enabling many oil producers to maintain output even as prices remain low. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. sees crude falling a further $10 a barrel as storage tanks fill up in the coming months. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, is trading around $50 a barrel this morning. Read the full story.
The fix is in: Volkswagen’s new chief executive says that a recall of cars with software at the center of the emissions-rigging scandal should start in January and the automaker aims to fix them all by the end of next year. Volkswagen has said up to 11 million vehicles worldwide across several of its brands contain the diesel engine with the software used to cheat on U.S. emissions tests. As CEO Matthias Mueller recently told the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “It will hopefully be fewer, but in any case still far too many.” Mueller said in an interview published today that in most cases a software update will suffice to fix the problem but some vehicles could need new injectors and catalyzers. The Associated Press has the full story.
