The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is paying $23 billion less in tax refunds for the 2023 filing season—with the average refund amount found to be lower by nearly $300.
The IRS has issued over 69 million refunds collectively worth $198.868 billion for the week ending April 7, 2023, according to the agency’s filing statistics. Compared to the $222.344 billion in refunds handed out in the 2022 season, the 2023 filing season’s refund is $23.476 billion smaller or about 10.6 percent lower.
The average refund amount between the filing seasons has dropped from $3,175 to $2,878, a decline of 9.3 percent or $297. In fiscal 2022, the IRS collected $2.9 trillion in individual income taxes.
Back in January, the IRS had suggested that refund amounts could be smaller this time around. “Due to tax law changes such as the elimination of the Advance Child Tax Credit and no Recovery Rebate Credit this year to claim pandemic-related stimulus payments, many taxpayers may find their refunds somewhat lower this year,” the IRS had said in a Jan. 23 news release.
The U.S. government handed out three rounds of stimulus checks to Americans during the pandemic period. People could claim the missed first and second rounds of stimulus checks on the 2020 tax return. Any missed third-round stimulus checks were claimed in the 2021 return which was filed in the 2022 season.
The federal government had also expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) program during the pandemic, boosting benefits per child from $2,000 to $3,600 for children under the age of 6, and to $3,000 for children between the ages of 6 and 17.
The benefits of stimulus payments and CTC have now ended, thereby contributing to a lower refund amount during the 2023 filing season.
Americans Concerned Over Smaller Tax Refunds
Smaller tax refunds pose a major issue for Americans, according to the results of a Bankrate survey published last month. When asked how important the tax refund is to their overall financial situation, 43 percent said that the refunds are “very important” while 32 percent said it was “somewhat important.”
A California state court jury on Friday handed Tesla a sweeping win, finding that the car maker’s Autopilot feature did not fail to perform safely in what appears to be the first trial related to a crash involving the partially automated driving software.
The verdict could be an important victory for Tesla as it tests and rolls out its Autopilot and more advanced “Full Self-Driving” system, which Chief Executive Elon Musk has touted as crucial to his company’s future, but which has drawn regulatory and legal scrutiny.
Justine Hsu, a resident of Los Angeles, sued the electric-vehicle maker in 2020, saying her Tesla Model S swerved into a curb while it was on Autopilot and then an airbag was deployed “so violently it fractured Plaintiff’s jaw, knocked out teeth, and caused nerve damage to her face.”
She alleged there were defects in the design of Autopilot and the airbag, and sought more than $3 million in damages for the alleged defects and other claims.
Tesla denied liability for the 2019 accident. It said in a court filing that Hsu used Autopilot on city streets, despite Tesla’s user manual warning against doing so.
During a court hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday, the jury awarded Hsu zero damages.
It also found that the airbag did not fail to perform safely, and that Tesla did not intentionally fail to disclose facts to her.
The verdict could be an important victory for Tesla as it tests and rolls out its Autopilot and more advanced “Full Self-Driving” system.REUTERS
Hsu broke down in tears outside the courtroom after the jury delivered its verdict.
One of Hsu’s attorneys, Donald Slavik, said they are disappointed in the result and appreciate the jury’s service. Tesla attorney Michael Carey declined to comment.
Tesla calls its driver-assistant systems Autopilot or Full Self-Driving, but says the features do not make the cars autonomous, and that human drivers should be “prepared to take over at any moment.”
The EV maker introduced its Autopilot in 2015, and the first fatal accident in the United States was reported in 2016, but the case never went to trial.
Critical time for Tesla
The Hsu trial, which has not been reported by other media, unfolded in Los Angeles Superior Court over the last three weeks, and featured testimony from three Tesla engineers.
It came at a critical time for the company as it braces for a spate of other trials starting this year related to the semi-automated driving system, which Musk has claimed is safer than human drivers.
While the trial’s outcome is not legally binding in other cases, it is considered a test case because it would serve as a bellwether to help Tesla and other plaintiffs’ lawyers hone their strategies, experts say.
Cassandra Burke Robertson, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law who has studied self-driving car liability, said early cases “give an indication of how later cases are likely to go.”
Tesla is also under investigation by the Justice Department and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over its claims about self-driving capabilities and the safety of the technology, respectively.
The main question in Autopilot cases was who is responsible for an accident while a car was in driver-assistant Autopilot mode — a human driver, the machine, or both?
Hsu’s lawsuit alleged that the Tesla vehicle hit the curb so suddenly that she had no time to avoid it even though she had her hands on the steering wheel and was alert.
Reuters was first to report that a 2016 video used by Tesla to promote its self-driving technology was actually staged, to show capabilities — such as stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light — that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer.
The details about the video were from a deposition of a Tesla executive in another case.
That executive, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, testified during the Hsu trial last week about the videotape.
“Gentlemen prefer bonds,” Larry Kudlow famously quipped.
Bonds can be attractive but hard to understand.
Not all bonds are created equal, and the occasionally complex paperwork given to investors is supposed to lay out their risks, to the extent they are known, and the order of who gets paid if things go badly.
While the gentlemen who preferred the now-infamous AT1 bonds Credit Suisse offered are understandably upset at losing $17 billion, investors in municipal general obligation bonds will find it hard to understand a big discrepancy.
On one hand, cities are suing oil and gas companies for alleged climate-related damages.
On the other, the same cities write in their municipal-bond disclosures they cannot attest to the effects of climate change.
This makes Friday’s Supreme Court conference on Suncor v. Boulder critical.
The nation’s highest court will decide if it will take up the case to rule on whether these climate suits should be heard in state or federal court.
No matter where they proceed, these cases not only lack merit but deserve greater scrutiny given the plaintiffs’ companion bond disclosures.
Municipalities like Boulder, San Francisco and Baltimore, among others, have been filing claims against oil and gas companies, seeking damages they allege are directly attributable to the firms’ actions.
But holders of these cities’ bonds could be forgiven for being surprised by these lawsuits.
Why?
Because the ambiguous claims these cities made to their bondholders belie the specific nature of the claims they later made to courts.
In their bond disclosures, these cities all acknowledge they’re unable to forecast with any degree of certainty climate change’s adverse effects and the science underlying their assumptions is evolving.
Fair enough. But contrast this with the incredibly specific claims in these cities’ lawsuits.
In 2017, San Francisco’s city attorney, Dennis Herrera, filed a lawsuit in state court against five energy companies, alleging they are responsible for very specific effects of climate change and should pay for infrastructure such as sea walls to deal with its ongoing and future consequences.
The lawsuit’s claim about predicting the effects of climate change comes into serious question when the city attorney’s bond-issuing employer has stated it cannot accurately determine the extent of climate change for its investors.
In a 2018 petition in Texas state court, Exxon alleged the “stark and irreconcilable conflict” between the municipalities’ allegations in the lawsuits and their disclosures in bond offerings indicated the suits were brought “not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California.”
Its petition was denied, but the concern about the “stark and irreconcilable conflict” has quietly simmered ever since — and for good reason.
Disclosures in other areas have been a source of angst for muni bondholders.
In 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a cease and desist order against the City of Boulder for misstating that it had complied with prior agreements to provide continuing disclosure to its investors.
What prompted renewed interest in this issue was not just the reexamination of bond risks after Credit Suisse’s failure but also the solicitor general’s recent recommendation to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to reject ExxonMobil and Suncor’s petition for their case to be heard in federal rather than state court.
Credit Suisse’s AT1 investors have reason to be upset but not necessarily all that surprised.
After all, those bonds were yielding 9.75%, suggesting the risks were high.
For comparison, the average yield on ostensibly much safer 10-year muni bonds is about 2.49%.
But what if, in addition to the risks laid out in disclosure documents, Credit Suisse had been aware of other material risks it had failed to disclose to its bondholders?
Well, that would be securities fraud.
Might the same hold true for these municipalities doing the bidding of trial lawyers pushing an extreme climate agenda?
To the extent that these cities have a much greater degree of certainty about the risks they face, have those risks been adequately described to all audiences, investors and the courts alike?
The question remains.
And while these lawsuits seem meritless, one hopes the Supreme Court concludes at least that they ought to remain in federal court — where they belong.
Caleb Johnson works with venture capital-backed tech companies through his advisory firm Harbor Policy LLC and is the founder of Harbor Macro Strategies LLC, a mostly quantitative hedge fund.
Or in the case of the 2020 election, it required deceiving American voters.
The House Judiciary Committee revealed that Blinken, then a top Biden adviser, orchestrated the letter from 51 top intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing but a Russian disinformation campaign.
Blinken contacted former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, who swayed scores of other former top officials — including three ex-CIA chiefs — to sign that letter to debunk the biggest threat to the Biden presidential campaign.
Polls show that Biden would have lost the election if the media had accurately reported the contents of that laptop.
Biden pretended that letter arose spontaneously from the patriotic sentiments of former officials.
But the letter was “triggered” by Blinken’s call to Morell, who then contacted his former colleagues.
Former CIA director Mike Pompeo summarized his agency’s motif: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.”REUTERS
Blinken’s ploy may have swayed Biden to appoint him secretary of state.
The media are mostly ignoring or downplaying the revelations of Blinken’s machinations.
If the roles were reversed, cable news and front-page headlines would be screaming about a villainous Trump operative pulling official strings to whitewash the Donald.
MSNBC would be howling about the death of democracy, and CNN hosts would be sobbing hysterically about the dirty deal.
But when Team Biden does it: nothing to see here, move along.
How many presidential elections can Democrats seek to dishonestly rig without suffering any penalty flags from media scorekeepers?
Shortly before the 2016 election, senior Hillary Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan peddled false claims linking the Trump Organization to Russia.
The Federal Election Commission last month levied a $113,000 fine on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier.
The FBI, which was apparently willing to pay any price to defeat Trump, offered former British spy Christopher Steele $1 million in cash if he could prove the charges in that dossier before the 2016 election.
There was no proof — but that didn’t stop the FBI from using the dossier to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Jake Sullivan is now Biden’s national security adviser.
Did he get that gig in part because of his willingness to lie for Democratic kingpins?
Avril Haines is Biden’s director of national intelligence.
Did signing the Hunter laptop letter help her snare that plum job?
The letter Blinken finagled would not have been so influential if journalists were not shamelessly docile to federal job titles.
Inside the Beltway, former intelligence kingpins are viewed like royalty or at least second-tier aristocracy.
But the CIA has a long record of secretly intervening in dozens of foreign elections.
In 2019, former CIA director Mike Pompeo summarized his agency’s motif: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses.”
Former CIA chief James Woolsey insisted in 2018 that the CIA intervenes in elections “only for a very good cause in the interests of democracy.”
Yet the letter from former spooks was instantly revered by journalists as if it were handed down from Mt. Sinai.
In the days before the election, Blinken orchestrated the letter from 51 top intelligence officials.REUTERS
For the Washington political elite, defeating Donald Trump was the ultimate good cause to save democracy.
Biden talks as if his 2020 election victory was the result of practically a divine incarnation of the “will of the people.”
Unfortunately, presidential elections are irrevocable regardless of how many voters were conned.
How much official deceit can democracy survive?
Any notion of “informed consent” by voters is a mirage if federal agencies and former officials have the power to endlessly distort the news.
Shortly after he became secretary of state, Blinken boasted that the US government doesn’t sweep problems “under the rug. . . . We deal with them in the daylight, with full transparency.”
That pledge apparently did not extend to Blinken’s own tampering with the 2020 election.
What else is Blinken hiding, and when will the next shoe fall?
New state Health Department figures on COVID deaths show that then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s leadership was even deadlier than New Yorkers knew.
The new stats put the pandemic’s first-year toll at 36,337 — up 21% from what the state had admitted.
The Cuomoites only counted deaths in hospitals, care homes and similar facilities, and that practice continued even after he was hounded from office — until now.
At last, the numbers include death-certificate info to count deaths at home, as the federal Centers for Disease Control and the city Health Department did all along.
This increases the 2020 downstate total by 6,283 lost lives.
This more-honest count shows that COVID was the city’s leading cause of death in 2020 and the No. 2 cause statewide.
Why hide the truth? Because it undercut Cuomo’s image as the heroic man-in-charge, a narrative that helped him score a $5.1 million advance for his book “American Crisis” (largely written by staff “volunteering” their time as COVID still raged).
In the wake of his orders forcing care homes to admit contagious patients, Cuomo & Co. also undercounted deaths in those homes, eventually pleading to state legislators that they feared a federal probe by the Trump Justice Department.
Cuomo is now pulling out all the stops in a bid to regain public support. This info should remind the people of New York that he doesn’t deserve it.
Worse is to come, when (if?) the Hochul administration finally makes public its long-delayed assessment of the Cuomo-era response to COVID.
Lawyers for first son Hunter Biden are scheduled to meet with Justice Department officials next week, including the US attorney handling the drawn-out investigation into the president’s son, according to reports.
The upcoming meeting was requested by Biden’s legal team weeks ago, according tomultiple outlets, and is unrelated to recent allegations that the president’s son is receiving “preferential treatment” in the probe.
Biden’s lawyers will reportedly meet with Delaware US Attorney David Weiss, who has led the investigation into Biden since 2018, and at least one other senior DOJ official.
The US Attorney’s Office in Delaware is reportedly considering four possible criminal charges that it could slap Biden with two misdemeanor counts of failing to file taxes, a felony count of evading taxes relating to a business expense and lying about his drug use on a gun purchase form.
Next week’s meeting is not necessarily a sign that a charging decision is imminent, a source told Fox News.
There is“growing frustration”within the FBI about the amount of time Weiss is taking weighing prosecuting Biden, NBC News reported Friday.
The US Attorney’s Office in Delaware is reportedly considering leveling four criminal charges against Hunter Biden.
The FBI’s Baltimore field office — which led efforts to gather evidence in the probe — completed the “bulk of their work” about a year ago, according to NBC News, and the IRS finished its investigation of the first son more than a year ago.
Earlier this week, an IRS whistleblower who supervised the Biden tax probe contacted Congress through an attorney, alleging that the case had been mishandled.
The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Lytle, wrote Wednesday that his client could also expose false statements made to Congress by a “senior political appointee.”
The Postreported on Thursdaythat Lytle is referring to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who twice told senators that Weiss has unilateral authority to bring charges against Biden.
The Delaware US Attorney’s Office declined to comment to The Post on next week’s meeting.
