Hasta La Gadget!

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tax reform plan will rely largely on future revenue gains from faster economic growth to justify major tax cuts, top Trump advisers said on Thursday.

As Trump’s first 100 days in office draw to a close, the disclosure is the latest sign that the White House could part ways with congressional Republicans who want to pay for tax cuts by taxing imports and eliminating a business tax deduction for debt interest payments.

“Some of the lowering in (tax) rates is going to be offset by less deductions and simpler taxes,” Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said in a question-and-answer session on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank spring meetings in Washington.

“But the majority of it will be made up by what we believe is fundamentally growth and dynamic scoring,” he added.

Dynamic scoring is a little-known government forecasting method that uses economic modeling to predict changes in revenues resulting from economic growth spurred by new tax and economic policies.

Republicans believe major tax reform would drive annual U.S. economic growth above 3 percent. But if anticipated improvement fails to materialize, the strategy could rob the Treasury of tax revenue and saddle the economy with bigger deficits and higher debt burdens.

Mnuchin said dynamic scoring could give Trump and Congress a $2 trillion revenue cushion for the first major overhaul of the U.S. tax code since 1986.

Gary Cohn, director of Trump’s National Economic Council, told the same gathering that dynamic scoring would help avoid deficit-funded tax cuts that could not be made permanent under Senate fiscal rules.

“Using dynamic scoring may allow us to get to a permanent solution,” Cohn said. “We would like a permanent solution.”

A congressional tax plan backed by House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan would raise over $2 trillion with a border adjustment proposal to tax imports while exempting exports from taxation, and by eliminating net interest deductions for businesses. But both measures have fierce opponents among businesses and Republican lawmakers.

Mnuchin said border adjustment could hurt U.S. exports by driving the dollar higher, or fuel consumer inflation if the dollar does not rise.

The administration’s goal is to unveil a plan soon that can quickly pass the House and Senate.

“This won’t take ‘til the end of the year,” Mnuchin said. “It will be sweeping, it will be significant and it will create a lot of economic growth.”

(Additional reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir and Jason Lange; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz  (R-Utah) who stunningly announced this week that he won’t seek re-election and may leave office before his term ends, strongly denied he’s quitting because of some as-yet publicized scandal.

“Not in any way shape or form,” Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, said in an interview with Politico. “I’ve been given more enemas by more people over the last eight years than you can possibly imagine,” he continued. “From the Secret Service to the Democratic Party. I am who I am. If they had something really scandalous, it would’ve come out a long, long time ago.”

Chaffetz made the shock announcement this week that he won’t run for re-election next year, or be “a candidate for any office” in 2018. In the days since, he said he may not even finish out his current term.

“If I do step down early, it will be months from now,” Chaffetz told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s hard for people to believe, I really do want to be with my family more. Maybe it’s more a midlife crisis more than anything else.”

The announcement has prompted waves of speculation about Chaffetz’ future. Some have said he may be eyeing a bid for governor in 2020. Chaffetz told the Journal he was looking at the private sector.

Utah election officials told Reuters they haven’t been formally told about any plans for Chaffetz to resign. Mark Thomas, the state’s director of elections, told Reuters officials have begun gathering information about when and how to hold a special election, but “don’t know what he’s planning.”

“This is more informal, just wanting to know ourselves and be prepared,” Thomas said.

Chaffetz has drawn fierce criticism from Democrats in recent months over claims he’s been slow to investigate President Donald Trump’s ongoing and unfounded claims of voter fraud and wiretapping by former President Barack Obama. He also drew sharp rebukes from Republicans and constituents after saying in February he wouldn’t look into ties between former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador ― a relationship that led to the Flynn’s firing.

“It’s taking care of itself,” Chaffetz said at the time.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

We never bought the hype on Juicero’s $700 connected cold-press machine, but the company’s CEO says anyone who did pay for one can get their money back. In a blog post on Medium, CEO Jeff Dunn responded to a Bloomberg report that pointed out the comp…

Back in May 2016, Apple announced that they would be making a $1 billion investment in local company called Didi Chuxing, which is more or less thought to be China’s equivalent of Uber. In fact Uber themselves have sold their China operations to the company, which pretty much has allowed the company to dominate the Chinese market.

In a recent post in TIME’s 2017 Most Influential People (via MacRumors), one of the people the magazine named is none other than Didi Chuxing’s President Jean Liu. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook even wrote an excerpt about Liu for the magazine, where he praised the company’s innovativeness, and also suggested that they could be on the path to eliminating traffic jams for good.

According to Cook’s excerpt, “She and her team are succeeding with innovative, big-data algorithms that aim both to improve the efficiency of Didi’s service and to ease the congestion on roadways. By analyzing commuter patterns the way oceanographers track the tides, Didi may help traffic jams go the way of the flip phone.”

Given Apple’s massive investment it’s not hard to see why Cook might be so optimistic about the Chinese company’s future and abilities. The company also revealed that they are working on self-driving cars which we can only imagine will go towards easing traffic congestion.

Apple Thinks Didi Chuxing Could Eventually Eliminate Traffic Jams , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Recently it seems that there have been some users complaining about their Huawei P10 and P10 Plus handsets, in which it was discovered that some handsets were only getting eMMC 5.1 memory speeds on their devices, as opposed to other P10 handsets that appeared to have UFS 2.0 or 2.1 chips that were getting considerably faster read speeds.

So what’s with the discrepancies? Turns out that this was because of the use of different chips, and apparently there is a shortage which is why Huawei had to make do with what they had. This is according to Huawei’s Business Group CEO Richard Yu who took to Weibo (via Engadget) and offered the explanation.

However he claims that real-life performance and experience is being maintained through hardware and software optimization, meaning that regardless of which chip you get, you should get the same experience. It should be noted that according to the benchmarks, the handsets with the eMMC 5.1 chips had read speeds of about 250MB/s, versus those with UFS 2.0 or 2.1 that were getting 550MB/s or 750MB/s.

Whether or not you’ll be able to tell the differences will depend on how observant you are, and also what kind of apps you are running. If you’re running something that’s intensive then you might be able to notice the differences, but if you’re just chatting or surfing the web, the difference might not be quite as apparent.

Huawei Explains Why Some P10 Handsets Are Slower Than Others , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.