'Historic' Tax Refunds Will Extend Retail Boom into 2019

[Vilepagan]

Source of the post Remember those "crumbs" Nancy Pelosi was talking about?

Wasn't she talking about Republicans?

[John Q. Public]

I had to go back and re-read the article the Professor quoted. The source was Bloomberg, BTW, and not MSN, which should have been noted in the OP.

The law cut tax rates for some individuals, but lots of Americans haven’t seen all those savings flow through to their paychecks, according to Wells Fargo & Co. That will be made up during a “historic” refund season early next year, with, for example, a household earning $45,000 a year realizing 70 percent of its tax benefit, the bank said Friday in a research note.

Note that the income bracket is a little low, and it said that people in that bracket would receive 70% of their benefit from their refunds but it also said people with incomes from $55,000 to $75,000 would get "as much as half" of their benefit from it. Could it be that the people being adversely affected are in the middle bracket and people in the lower bracket could get a benefit? Or were the article and the Wells Fargo analysts just wrong? Or are the early reports wrong? How could the analysts have missed the part about the IRS, possibly for political reasons, adjusting withholdings down? And why would politicians target a bracket that's probably mostly hourly workers who would be likely to attribute a (not large) bump in their paychecks to simply getting more hours instead of their taxes going down?

The article also said that Home Depot had looked at its employees' paychecks and that only 1% of them had adjusted their withholding, so... uh oh. Or not. Maybe we have to wait till April to find out which of the stories is correct.

[Wabash]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say those getting lower refunds are not taking advantage of the new deductions for their private jets.

[John Q. Public]

IF taxes really are lower, which I have no way of telling, personally, having the savings not be reflected as bigger refunds is about as boneheaded as it gets.

[SK80]

Actually you want the lowest refund, the government holding YOUR money and paying NO interest to you is not optimum for the tax payer. A smaller refund means the government took less from you.

[John Q. Public]

The Census Bureau confirms my parking lot survey.

Sales at retailers fizzled in December and posted the biggest decline in nine years in a worrisome sign for the U.S. economy, according to a long-delayed government report.

Retail sales sank 1.2% in December, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday. It’s the largest drop since September 2009, a few months after the end of the Great Recession.

~snip~

The disappointing drop in sales battered stocks in early Thursday trades, but many economists were skeptical that sales were quite the disaster the report seemed to indicate.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/retai ... 2019-02-14

The report includes a 3.9% drop for internet sellers and a 3.3% drop for department stores. Car sales were up 1% and home centers were up 0.1%. Early reports aren't always especially accurate.

[crayegg]

It's the middle of February, this is an early report on last December? Why was the report "long delayed" I wonder....

Oh, government shutdown, duh.

[Vilepagan]

Source of the post Remember those "crumbs" Nancy Pelosi was talking about?

Yeah...do you?

Looks like Nancy might have been on to something.