The road (or light-rail) to the World Cup

What's new in your tax return this year?

From Marketplace.

I'm Sabrina Beneshore, in for David Brunk Hachio.

First, a quick update on the Middle East.

After President Trump said yesterday morning, shortly before markets opened that talks

with Iran were ongoing, Iran said there were no talks.

Iran has continued to attack U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf.

Iran and Israel are still trading fire.

Israel continued strikes in Lebanon where a million people have been displaced.

The price of oil is still hovering around $100 a barrel.

It is tax season and, thanks to last year's GOP tax and spending law, there are lots of

changes to the rules.

As Marketplace's senior Washington correspondent Kimberly Adams reports, one of the biggest

involves the deduction for state and local taxes.

So far this tax season, refunds have been trending higher.

Rachel Snyderman is managing director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

We are seeing that average tax refunds are upwards of about $3,600 or $350 higher than

that same period last year.

And one reason for those bigger refunds changes to the state and local tax deduction, or

salt deduction.

It used to be taxpayers could only write off $10,000 of their state and local taxes when

calculating their federal taxes, but the one big beautiful bill act boosted that to $40,000

with some limits.

So for folks who file this year, about a quarter of the value of the tax cut that's provided

in 2025 will be just from that salt cap increase.

Garrett Watson is director of policy analysis at the tax foundation.

And of course that 25% amount is going to be concentrated in folks who are itemizing

which by our estimate is somewhere around 12 to 13% of filers.

And those filers tend to have higher incomes.

Tim Simons is the founder of the Simons group tax advisory in the DC area.

The clients who are above 200,000 and between I'd say 200 to 400 and that are itemizing.

Simons mainly works with higher income clients and says many of them are getting bigger

than usual refund checks thanks to the increased salt deduction.

Probably about 15 to 20% of my clients are seeing a significant increase because of that.

But those bigger refunds come at a cost according to the bipartisan policy center.

Their estimated budget impact is about $140 billion over the next decade.

In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams from Marketplace.

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In a few months, soccer fans will flock from around the world to 16 cities across North

America for the World Cup.

The matches are happening for mid-June to mid-July, and each one is expected to be massive,

tens of thousands of fans per game.

All those fans will need a way to get to the games, and many will take public transit.

So a lot of transit agencies in World Cup host cities are planning to expand service during

the tournament, and in some cases, they're making an extra push to finish up big infrastructure

projects in time, as Marketplace's Henry Epp reports.

Sometimes you need a deadline to get a project done, at least I do, and apparently some transit

agencies do too.

For decades, Seattle has been planning to run a light rail line across Lake Washington,

which divides the west and east sides of the metro area.

The cross-like connection is something that was originally envisioned back in the 60s.

Henry Benton is a spokesperson for Sound Transit, which runs the region's light rail system.

Construction on the line started in 2016, it's faced plenty of delays, but the prospect

of tens of thousands of soccer fans descending on the city this summer gave Sound Transit a hard

deadline.

The World Cup was, uh, it was a, we must have this open moment.

And they're gonna meet it.

The line opens later this week.

On the other side of the country, Boston's public transit agency is upgrading a commuter

rail station near the home of the New England Patriots in Foxboro, Massachusetts, which

will host seven World Cup matches.

Christian Milneal's editor of Street's Blog Mass, a local transportation news site.

The Foxboro station was just a patch of asphalt next to the tracks.

Which just wouldn't cut it for thousands of international soccer fans boarding the train.

So by this summer, it'll have a new raised platform, ADA compliant, constructed in just

one year.

That's warp speed by Massachusetts standards, Milneal says.

A lot of those projects can take like up to a decade to get funded and designs and completed.

Upgrades like the ones in Foxboro and Seattle will last long after the tournament.

But in the short term, the Cup also presents a huge logistical challenge to transit agencies,

says Yona Freemark at the Urban Institute.

When you're talking about 60 to 80,000 people coming out of a facility at one time after

the conclusion of a game, you know, that can put a huge amount of pressure on even the

highest capacity transit systems.

And so most host cities plan to run extra buses and trains before and after games.

The federal government will pay for some of that service.

And at least for a few weeks, some cities will get a taste of what a more robust public

transit system looks like.

In Kansas City, for example, the local World Cup host committee is renting 200 buses to

create new temporary routes all over the region.

Eric Bunch is a city council member in Kansas City.

He hopes the extra World Cup service could influence local transit policy after the tournament

ends.

We have an opportunity here to showcase how it could work here and leverage that for

bigger, longer term improvements, ones to serve local commuters, not just visiting soccer

fans.

I'm Henry App from Marketplace.

Our producers are Emma Condon, Tamar Fagan, Ashley Rodriguez, Ariana Rosas, and Erica

Soderstrom.

Our senior producer is Alex Schroeder.

Our supervising senior producer is Meredith Kertz and Morby.

And in New York, I'm Sabri Beneshore with the Marketplace Morning Report.

From APM, American Public Media.