By JOSH BOAK and JILL COLVIN (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Tax Day reveals a major split in how Joe Biden and Donald Trump would govern: The presidential candidates have conflicting ideas about how much to reveal about their own finances and the best ways to boost the economy through tax policy.

Biden, the sitting Democratic president, plans to release his income tax returns on Monday, the IRS filing deadline. And on Tuesday, he is scheduled to deliver a speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, about why the wealthy should pay more in taxes to reduce the federal deficit and help fund programs for the poor and middle class.

Biden is proud to say that he was largely without money for much of his decades-long career in public service, unlike Trump, who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father and used his billionaire status to launch a TV show and later a presidential campaign.

“For 36 years, I was listed as the poorest man in Congress,” Biden told donors in California in February. “Not a joke.”

In 2015, Trump declared as part of his candidacy, “I’m really rich.”

The Republican former president has argued that voters have no need to see his tax data and that past financial disclosures are more than sufficient. He maintains that keeping taxes low for the wealthy will supercharge investment and lead to more jobs, while tax hikes would crush an economy still recovering from inflation that hit a four-decade peak in 2022.

“Biden wants to give the IRS even more cash by proposing the largest tax hike on the American people in history when they are already being robbed by his record-high inflation crisis,” said Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for the Trump campaign.

The split goes beyond an ideological difference to a very real challenge for whoever triumphs in the November election. At the end of 2025, many of the tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire — setting up an avalanche of choices about how much people across the income spectrum should pay as the national debt is expected to climb to unprecedented levels.

Including interest costs, extending all the tax breaks could add another $3.8 trillion to the national debt through 2033, according to an analysis last year by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Biden would like to keep the majority of the tax breaks, based on his pledge that no one earning less than $400,000 will have to pay more. But he released a budget proposal this year with tax increases on the wealthy and corporations that would raise $4.9 trillion in revenues and trim forecasted deficits by $3.2 trillion over 10 years.

Still, he’s telling voters that he’s all for letting the Trump-era tax cuts lapse.

“Does anyone here think the tax code is fair? Raise your hand,” Biden said Tuesday at a speech in Washington’s Union Station to a crowd predisposed to dislike Trump’s broad tax cuts that helped many in the middle class but disproportionately favored wealthier households.

“It added more to the national debt than any presidential term in history,” Biden continued. “And it’s due to expire next year. And guess what? I hope to be president because it expires — it’s going to stay expired.”

Trump has called for higher tariffs on foreign-made goods, which are taxes that could hit consumers in the form of higher prices. But his campaign is committed to tax cuts while promising that a Trump presidency would reduce a national debt that has risen for decades, including during his Oval Office tenure.

“When President Trump is back in the White House, he will advocate for more tax cuts for all Americans and reinvigorate America’s energy industry to bring down inflation, lower the cost of living, and pay down our debt,” Leavitt said.

Most economists say Trump’s tax cuts could not generate enough growth to pay down the national debt. An analysis released Friday by Oxford Economics found that a “full-blown Trump” policy with tax cuts, higher tariffs and blocking immigration would slow growth and increase inflation.

Among Biden’s proposals is a “billionaire minimum income tax” that would apply a minimum rate of 25% on households with a net worth of at least $100 million.

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The tax would directly target billionaires such as Trump, who refused to release his personal taxes as presidents have traditionally done. But six years of his tax returns were released in 2022 by Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

In 2018, Trump earned more than $24 million and paid about 4% of that in federal income taxes. The congressional panel also found that the IRS delayed legally mandated audits of Trump during his presidency, with the panel concluding the audit process was ” dormant, at best.”

Biden has publicly released more than two decades of his tax returns. In 2022, he and his wife, Jill, made $579,514 and paid nearly 24% of that in federal income taxes, more than double the rate paid by Trump.

Trump has maintained that his tax records are complicated because of his use of various tax credits and past business losses, which in some cases have allowed him to avoid taxes. He also previously declined to release his tax returns under the claim that the IRS was auditing him for pre-presidential filings.

His finances recently received a boost from the stock market debut of Trump Media, which controls Trump’s preferred social media outlet, Truth Social. Share prices initially surged, adding billions of dollars to Trump’s net worth, but investors have since soured on the company and shares by Friday were down more than 50% from their peak.

The former president is also on the hook for $542 million due to legal judgments in a civil fraud case and penalties owed to the writer E. Jean Carroll because of statements made by Trump that damaged her reputation after she accused him of sexual assault.

In the civil fraud case, New York Judge Arthur Engoron looked at the financial records of the Trump Organization and concluded after looking at the inflated assets that “the frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience.”

Colvin reported from Palm Beach, Florida.

Out in West Texas, a pair of aspiring novelists and enterprising small-town newspaper owners, Barbara Brannon and Kay Ellington, were dismayed by the number of publications that were dropping book sections, cutting critics, and otherwise decimating literary coverage, especially in the Lone Star State. By the 2010s, “93 percent of the state’s newspapers offer no regular books coverage of any kind,” they told the Writers’ League of Texas.

Both newswomen worried that Texas authors in particular just weren’t getting enough attention—though plenty deserved it.

Out of that gaping hole emerged, fittingly on Groundhog’s Day 2015, a new literary venture: Lone Star Literary Life, an online newsletter aimed at Texas readers, writers, and librarians.

“Texas is second only in population to California, Florida is third and New York is fourth. We should be the 800-pound gorilla of literature,” Ellington said of their effort in a 2017 panel discussion.

Initially, it was only a side project for Brannon and Ellington, a dynamic duo who have now published several novels (a series all about The Paragraph Ranch) while still stubbornly championing small-town papers too. (Their company, Paragraph Ranch LLC, now owns three around Lubbock: the Texas Spur, in Spur; the Caprock Courier in Silverton; and the Floyd County Hesperian-Beacon.)

Over the next nine years, Lone Star Literary Life grew, creating a network of 6,000 loyal subscribers, including Texas librarians, indie booksellers, publicists, and authors. 

In 2018, school librarian Kristine Hall took over and Lone Star Lit coasted through the pandemic when many Texans were home reading—and writing. But the upstart venture nearly died in April 2024, a victim perhaps of its own business model of providing substantive but low-cost (or free) services to readers and authors across Texas. It had become popular but not profitable enough to sustain a team of employees large enough to support it without burning out. 

Here’s the saga of how independent women business owners and book lovers in Texas founded that small company, expanded it, and now aim to save it. 

From its beginnings, Lone Star Lit was ambitious. The Texas-centric newsletter offered announcements on book events, a statewide bookstore directory, and coverage of Texas authors’ latest work, whether from big publishers, boutique operations like Dallas’ literary powerhouse Deep Ellum, academic presses, and even self-published work. 

Early on, Hall, who already ran a blog she called Hall Ways, joined the operation. Hall formed a network of bloggers who agreed to help cover the book launches of Texas authors in what was dubbed Book Blog Tours, for which authors paid small but affordable fees meant to support the company’s operations.

She and other contributors at Lone Star Lit also helped boost book tourism by expanding their statewide directory to 300 bookstores and publishing an annual list of the Top Texas Bookish Destinations. That list has included predictable big-city entries like Austin and Houston, as well as Abilene, home to the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature, and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, which hosts both the McAllen Book Festival and the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival. 

When Hall first joined Lone Star Lit, she still worked as a long-term substitute school librarian for Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, which hadn’t yet become the center of Texas’ war on books. She immediately embraced her role as a book promoter.

By December 2018,  Ellington and Brannon, both “newspaper people” at heart, decided to sell their newsletter and Hall took over as the owner, manager, publisher, and frequent contributor.

“When our team took over the Texas Spur in 2018, it was with full expectation we could manage both projects, but community newspapering turned out to be much more demanding than [we] anticipated—in a good way,” Brannon told the Observer. “We were fortunate—as is the community of Texas book lovers—that Kristine was eager to step up. We’ve continued to cheer her on since then!”

For the next six years, Hall continued to grow Lone Star Lit, though as a part-time librarian and mother of five (and later grandmother of two) she sometimes struggled to find a work-life balance. 

As efforts to ban books escalated in school districts near Hall’s home and beyond, the controversies seemed only to galvanize Lone Star Lit readers, who wanted to know what they could do. “With the banning of the books, I think people are looking for a way to support the Texas literary community. People want to be able to do something, but they don’t always know what to do,” Hall said.

Over the nine years of Lone Star Lit’s life, more independent booksellers and literary festivals popped up in unexpected places. The massive Texas Book Festival and the San Antonio Book Festival remained the biggest—drawing national and Texas talent—while the Hill Country town of Boerne built a beautiful new library, and librarians there turned their lovely town square into a festival venue. The town of Winnsboro in East Texas created a book festival too, and a brand new one just popped up in the Austin suburbs called “Bees and Books.”

Hall considered herself a book booster, an amplifier. “I hear about stuff and I share it. I hear about bookish job opportunities and I share them,” she said in an interview this month. “I subscribe to a ton of newsletters.”

But at times, Hall told the Observer, there seemed to be an overwhelming amount of interest in Lone Star Lit. Sometimes it was too much. “I am Texan and I always had a passion for books,” she said. “I’m still very passionate about it. I’m just tired.”

By early 2024, Hall announced that she was ready to retire. Suddenly, the lights of Lone Star Lit seemed ready to go out. 

But readers responded (as they often do) to Hall’s posts with detailed comments and long emails. To her surprise, some of those emails contained offers to buy the business that she figured no one else would be crazy enough to want to run.

By late March, she’d whittled down the list to four finalists, finally selecting Amy Kelly, a former middle school teacher and Lone Star Lit fan who had for years been writing about YA books on her own blog. “I feel like all of my experience so far has led to this because I am so passionate about the freedom to read and the fact that stories save lives,” Kelly told the Observer.

By May 1, Lone Star Lit will be under new ownership. At least for now, all of the standard features—the book calendar, the list of indie bookstores, the book blog tours, and newsletters—won’t change, Kelly told Hall in their April handover meeting. 

Kelly said she wants to “continue and carry the torch to highlight indie bookstores and Texas authors and librarians.  

Back in Lubbock, Brannon, the original Lone Star Lit co-founder who remains a loyal reader, was busy putting out her newspapers this week when she got a call from the Observer sharing the news that Lone Star Lit would go on.

 “You know something I don’t know,” she said. “And I’m glad.”

Disclosure: Lise Olsen, a Texas author herself, has been featured in Lone Star Literary Life.

WASHINGTON — On this Tax Day, the IRS is promoting the customer service improvements the agency rolled out since receiving tens of billions in new funding dollars through Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.

From cutting phone wait times to digitizing more documents and improving the “Where’s My Refund” tool to show more account details in plain language, agency leadership is trying to bring attention to what’s been done to repair the agency’s image as an outdated and maligned tax collector.

The promotion also in part is meant to quickly normalize a more efficient and effective IRS before congressional Republicans threaten another round of cuts to the agency. So time is of the essence for both taxpayers and the agency this season.

Get IRS contact info at irs.gov/help/let-us-help-you.

“This filing season, the IRS has built off past successes and reached new milestones,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on a Friday call with reporters. “It’s showing that when it has the resources it needs, it will provide taxpayers the service they deserve.”

“Delivering tax season is a massive undertaking,” said IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel. “We greatly appreciate people in many different areas working long hours to serve taxpayers as the tax deadline approaches.”

For most people, April 15 is the last day to submit tax returns or to file an extension and the IRS says it has received more than 100 million tax returns, with tens of millions more expected to be filed.

The IRS says call wait times have been cut down to three minutes this tax season, compared with the average 28 minutes in 2022. That has saved taxpayers 1.4 million hours of hold time and the agency has answered 3 million more calls compared with the same time frame. Also, an updated “Where’s My Refund” tool giving more specific information about taxpayers’ refunds in plain language was rolled out to 31 million views online.

Werfel told The Associated Press earlier in the tax season that the agency’s agenda is to deliver “better service for all Americans so that we can ease stress, frustration and make the tax filing process easier — and to increase scrutiny on complex filers where there’s risk of tax evasion.”

“When we do that,” Werfel said, “not only do we make the tax system work better because it’s easier and more streamlined to meet your tax obligations. But also we collect more money for the U.S. Treasury and lower our deficit. The IRS is a good investment.”

Major new initiatives in recent months have included an aggressive pursuit of high-wealth earners who don’t pay their full tax obligations, such as people who improperly deduct personal flights on corporate jets and those who just don’t file at all.

This also is the first tax season that the IRS has rolled out a program called Direct File, the government’s free electronic tax return filing system available to taxpayers in 12 states who have simple W-2 forms and claim a standard deduction.

If Direct File is successful and scaled up for the general public’s use, the program could drastically change how Americans file their taxes and how much money they spend completing them. That is, if the agency can see the program through its development in spite of threats to its funding.

The Inflation Reduction Act initially included $80 billion for the IRS.

However, House Republicans have successfully clawed back some of the money. They built a $1.4 billion reduction to the IRS into the debt ceiling and budget cuts package passed by Congress last summer. A separate agreement will take an additional $20 billion from the IRS over the next two years to divert to other nondefense programs.

Government watchdogs warn IRS funding cuts will reduce the amount of revenues the U.S. collects.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported in February that a $5 billion rescission from the IRS would reduce revenues by $5.2 billion over the next 10 years and increase the cumulative deficit by $0.2 billion. A $20 billion rescission would reduce revenues by $44 billion and a $35 billion rescission would reduce revenues by $89 billion and increase the deficit by $54 billion.

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