About tax refund discourse the more I’m convinced the average American’s brain just completely short circuits when you try and explain the time value of money to them. Getting a small refund is *good* because it means your withholdings were more accurate to what you should have paid throughout the year, which means you keep your money on payday rather than letting the feds hold onto it for a year and then give it back to you without interest. But the average person is a literal child that goes “BIG NUMBER = GOOD, SMALL NUMBER = BAD”
Obviously the whole process is a scam to begin with, I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops when the IRS can do their job and just tell me how much I owe them, but that’s beside the point.
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I think the disconnect in this logic is that the average person is poor at saving. The majority of people live paycheck to paycheck and will spend that extra few bucks if they have it, but if they get it as a lump sum once a year they can use it more wisely.
