Hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman warns that the stakes are indeed high in the coming weeks as President Donald Trump works with Republican leaders in Congress to pass tax reform after failing to replace Obamacare.
"The Republicans can't go into midterms 0-for-2...this country is going to move to the left," the chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors told CNBC.
Cooperman doesn't think failure to pass tax reform will significantly hurt the stock market.
"I don't think we would tank unless the economy got derailed," he said.
Cooperman cautioned that Trump would only benefit from changing his behavior.
"As a business person, I'd say his behavior ought to be somewhat different, and we're going to pay a price if it isn't different in the midterm elections," said Cooperman. "I don't think it's healthy, and I'd rather him tweet less and try to unify. We need a president that unifies," he said.
For his part, Trump began talks with Republican senators on Tuesday to try to build consensus for proposed tax cuts in a meeting that was overshadowed by an exchange of insults between the president and one of the lawmakers.
Trump has asked his fellow Republicans who control Congress to pass a package of tax cuts, including a deep reduction in the corporate income tax, by year’s end, Reuters reported.
But hours before he was to promote the tax plan at a weekly lunch for Republican senators on Capitol Hill, Trump engaged in a distracting tussle with one of those lawmakers: Bob Corker, a leading fiscal hawk and the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“Bob Corker, who ... couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee, is now fighting Tax Cuts,” Trump wrote on Twitter, later adding that the senator is “incompetent.”
On the healtcare-reform front, two prominent Republican lawmakers from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on Tuesday proposed short-term measures to stabilize Obamacare health insurance markets that would compete with bipartisan legislation under discussion in the Senate, Reuters reported.
The proposal outlined by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Republican Representative Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, includes provisions to suspend requirements for individuals and employers to buy health coverage under former President Barack Obama’s healthcare law.
The recommendations appear to address many of the Trump administration’s objections to a short-term fix drafted by senators Lamar Alexander, a Republican, and Patty Murray, a Democrat. Democrats are likely to oppose such changes as undermining the viability of Obamacare’s subsidized insurance market for individuals.
Like the bipartisan proposal, the Hatch-Brady fix would reinstate billions of dollars in subsidy payments to insurers that Trump jettisoned earlier this month. Insurers say they had to raise monthly premium rates by 20 percent on average for 2018 to account for the lost subsidies, but could reduce consumers costs if they are restored.
“It is encouraging to see a growing consensus that Congress should fund the cost-sharing reduction payments for two more years,” Alexander said in response.
(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).
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