Travel Nightmares: How to Avoid Getting Bumped from Your Flight
You're finally on your way out for a summer vacation. The flight was booked months ago. Your bags are packed and ready. You arrive at the airport the recommended 90 minutes before the scheduled departure time (because it's a great long trip, and you've decided to check your bags). After enduring the inhumanity that is the TSA line, you get to your gate. Of course, everyone else has done the same thing, and you hear the familiar strains of "this flight is overbooked, we are offering a travel voucher if you are willing to fly on a later flight."
But you ignore that, as always, because, well, your bags are already on the plane, and you don't want to miss even a second of your long-awaited time away. Still, that $300 voucher sounds tempting. You could use it to help defray the cost of holiday travel in a few months.
Don't do it. Resisting that temptation can be even more rewarding: If the worst still happens and you get involuntarily bumped, you can get a full refund of your ticket price plus up to $1,300 in added compensation.
The AirHelp inforgraphic below lays out the basic dos and don'ts of dealing with an overbookd flight. You can also find more from AirHelp here.
(h/t lifehacker.com)
Deficit Hits $738.6 Billion in First 8 Months of Fiscal Year
The U.S. budget deficit grew to $738.6 billion in the first eight months of the current fiscal year – an increase of $206 billion, or 38.8%, over the deficit recorded during the same period a year earlier. Bloomberg’s Sarah McGregor notes that the big increase occurred despite a jump in tariff revenues, which have nearly doubled to $44.9 billion so far this fiscal year. But that increase, which contributed to an overall increase in revenues of 2.3%, was not enough to make up for the reduced revenues from the Republican tax cuts and a 9.3% increase in government spending.
Tweet of the Day: Revenues or Spending?
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee and one of the authors of the 2017 Republican tax overhaul, told The Washington Post’s Heather Long Tuesday that the budget deficit is driven by excess spending, not a shortfall in revenues in the wake of the tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal’s Kate Davidson provided some inconvenient facts for Brady’s claim in a tweet, pointing out that government revenues as a share of GDP have fallen significantly since 2015, while spending has remained more or less constant.
Chart of the Day: The Decline in IRS Audits
Reviewing the recent annual report on tax statistics from the IRS, Robert Weinberger of the Tax Policy Center says it “tells a story of shrinking staff, fewer audits, and less customer service.” The agency had 22% fewer personnel in 2018 than it did in 2010, and its enforcement budget has fallen by nearly $1 billion, Weinberger writes. One obvious effect of the budget cuts has been a sharp reduction in the number of audits the agency has performed annually, which you can see in the chart below.
Number of the Day: $102 Million
President Trump’s golf playing has cost taxpayers $102 million in extra travel and security expenses, according to an analysis by the left-leaning HuffPost news site.
“The $102 million total to date spent on Trump’s presidential golfing represents 255 times the annual presidential salary he volunteered not to take. It is more than three times the cost of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that Trump continually complains about. It would fund for six years the Special Olympics program that Trump’s proposed budget had originally cut to save money,” HuffPost’s S.V. Date writes.
Date says the White House did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
Americans See Tax-Paying as a Duty
The IRS may not be conducting audits like it used to, but according to the agency’s Data Book for 2018, most Americans still believe it’s not acceptable to cheat on your taxes. About 67% of respondents to an IRS opinion survey “completely agree” that it’s a civic duty to pay “a fair share of taxes,” and another 26% “mostly agree,” bringing the total in agreement to over 90%. Accounting Today says that attitude has been pretty consistent over the last decade.
