Don't Bank On Trump's Tax Cuts

What A Day

News, Daily News

4.6 • 12.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2026

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The IRS has lost tens of thousands of employees since President Donald Trump took office – the result of DOGE, policy differences, last year’s government shutdown, and layoffs. Now that we're in tax season, the agency is asking thousands of untrained employees from other departments to help with taxpayer services. Those job cuts and changes could, at best, slow down your refund. At worst, the IRS could be far less able to stop scammers. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is insisting that taxpayers will be getting bigger refunds this year. The problem is, prices on basically everything are still super high – which gives people less of a chance to hold onto that money. And will anyone even remember their tax refunds when they head out to vote in November? For more, we spoke with Vanessa Williamson, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of “The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History.”

And in headlines, Arizona Republicans want to send ICE officers to polling places, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stand in a case weighing if social media platforms deliberately addict and harm children, and the Trump administration pushes back against a court order to restore an exhibit on people enslaved by George Washington in Philadelphia.

Show Notes:

Check out Vanessa's book – brookings.edu/books/the-price-of-democracy/
Call Congress – 202-224-3121
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For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Thursday, February 19th.
0:05.5	I'm Jane Koston, and this is what a day.
0:07.6	The show that learned President Donald Trump was hosting a Black History Month event on Wednesday
0:11.7	and thought, I wonder how stupid it will be.
0:14.9	Herschel Walker speaking about Loyal, how good a football player was Herschel.
0:18.8	Herschel Walker, now he's ambassador to the Bahamas.
0:22.6	I don't know, Bahamas, Bermuda.
0:25.0	Is he Bahamas? Whatever.
0:27.2	It's a nice place.
0:30.4	Oh, that's stupid.
0:33.3	Okay.
0:34.5	And let's not even get into Trump fawning over Nikki Minaj's nails. Okay. And let's not even get into Trump fawning over Nikki Minaj's nails.
0:44.2	On today's show, Arizona Republicans want to supply ice at polling places, and not the kind
0:49.1	that combats the state's hot temperatures. And meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes a stand in a case weighing if social media platforms
0:55.7	deliberately addict and harm children. Well, let's start with the Internal Revenue Service.
1:00.7	It's tax season in case you haven't gotten a thousand emails from TurboTax yet. And the Trump
1:05.5	administration would like you to know, or believe, rather, that your tax refund is going to be
1:10.2	big this year. Here's President
1:11.9	Trump at a cabinet meeting in December sounding positively thrilled about it.
1:16.5	Next year is projected to be the largest tax refund season ever, and we're going to be
1:22.2	giving back refunds out of the tariffs because we've taken in literally trillions of dollars,
1:28.9	and we're going to be given a nice dividend to the people in addition to reducing debt.
	...

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