The IRS’s free online filing system is now available to half the country
Marketplace Morning Report
Marketplace
4.5 • 927 Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The average American tax filer spends more than $200 on tax prep each year, often through tax softwares like TurboTax, H&R Block or TaxSlayer. But the IRS has been piloting a free filing system, Direct File, and it’s now available to people in 25 states. Plus, consumers are more downbeat on the economy, and the Trump administration is offering a sort of buyout package to federal workers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Consumers are getting worried. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. Consumers got more downbeat on the economy here in the dawn of 2025. There had been pretty steady improvement in consumer sentiment through last summer and early fall as inflation moderated and mortgage rates fell briefly. But now consumers are anticipating worse to come, |
| 0:22.1 | Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman reports. |
| 0:24.7 | The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index fell sharply in January for a second month in a row. |
| 0:30.7 | Senior economist Stephanie Gischard says consumers have become more worried about future unemployment. |
| 0:37.0 | They also expect inflation to pick up in the coming year |
| 0:40.0 | after seeing some key prices rise recently. |
| 0:43.4 | What matters for them is how much they pay for their gas, for their eggs, their cars. |
| 0:50.3 | Another thing that's affecting consumer sentiment, a change of power in Washington. |
| 0:54.9 | There is this sort of switcheroo happening. |
| 0:57.6 | Chris Jackson at polling firm Ipsos says when political control shifts, consumers respond. |
| 1:04.0 | Democratic positive attitudes about the economy really collapsed the day after the election. |
| 1:09.1 | Republican positive attitudes are going up, but they're not all the way to the point where Democrats were after the election. Republican positive attitudes are going up, |
| 1:11.9 | but they're not all the way to the point where Democrats were before the election. |
| 1:16.0 | Jackson expects Republican sentiment to keep improving now that President Trump is in office, |
| 1:21.4 | pushing overall consumer sentiment higher in coming months. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace. |
| 1:27.3 | The Trump administration is offering a kind of buyout package to federal workers. The administration |
| 1:32.6 | sent out a memo saying government employees can choose to resign and get paid through September |
| 1:37.8 | or face the chance of layoffs later. Meanwhile, the president removed two members of the |
| 1:43.0 | Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, |
| 1:44.8 | as well as one member and the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. |
| 1:49.3 | Those agencies can be hobbled without the requisite number of appointed leaders. |
| 1:53.3 | Marketplace's Nova Safo has that. |
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