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slash donate and thank you. Send money overseas and pay an extra tax. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles, first to a milestone of sorts for the stock market.

We can tell you now that the popular S&P 500 index is up for the year so far, but just slightly,

up eight-tenths of 1% since New Year, so not even 1%.

It's middle of May here, and many investors would have wanted

better. Susan Schmidt is portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources. If we compare this to

previous years, we were doing much, much better by May. So the fact that it's flat is really just a

reprieve from where we've been, but if you count since January, it's not all that impressive.

I mean, what? It's just continued policy uncertainty, right? It's hard for businesses to plan.

You really want to staff up or make other investment decisions if you're not sure just which way things go.

That's right. And we continue to hear that from management teams who are out talking about that right now as they release earnings.

Many of them are pulling guidance. This could all change in just a couple of months or even next week.

I suppose you could look at it a different way, right? We're up from the nadir, from the pit that was dug for stocks after the first big tariff announcements were made, Liberation Day. So there's been

improvement if you look at the kind of six-week time frame. There has been improvement because we

are up quite a bit. But remember that investors have a very short-term horizon when they look at

things. There's a euphoria that we've recovered from that,

but back to your opening point, we're still just flat. There's a long way to go for the year

to match previous year's returns, and it's still a very uncertain environment as we roll forward.

Susan Schmidt, portfolio manager at Exchange Capital Resources. Thank you.

Thank you. Now let's take a look at the vast tax proposal up for consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives and thumbing in deep to page 327, just so you know, it proposes a 5% tax on money people send to family and friends overseas, remittances. This is money sent electronically

that often sustains the folks back home for many immigrant families. And there are exceptions,

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