The actual effects versus the claimed effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) are becoming clearer all the time. (The TCJA is the December 2017 tax cut bill rushed into law by Republicans in Congress and President Trump.) A previous post provided a summary of what the TCJA did, the promises made about its effects, and the actual effects of the law. My last post reviewed the largely failed provisions that were supposed to tax the profits of multinational corporations more fairly.
Promised benefits for workers have failed to materialize and claims that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act resulted in bonuses and wage increases for workers are unfounded. When President Trump signed the TCJA in December 2017, he stated that corporations would give “billions and billions of dollars away to their workers.” This has not happened.
Over the last two years, there has been no increase in workers’ compensation that can be attributed to the TCJA. In the short-term, to support the President and the rationale for the TCJA, some large corporations asserted that the bonuses they gave to workers in late 2017 were due to the TCJA. These bonuses were largely a public relations stunt. A few of those employers, such as AT&T and Walmart, engaged in major publicity around giving workers bonuses and then quietly laid off thousands of workers shortly thereafter.
The TCJA did incentivize the shifting of one-time bonuses from 2018 into 2017. Because expenses recorded in 2017 reduced 2017 profits when the tax rate was higher than it would be in 2018, it was advantageous to book as many expenses as possible in 2017. The value of the deduction of expenses, including the bonuses, from profits was more valuable under the 35% tax rate in place in 2017 than it would be in 2018 when the tax rate would only be 21%. In other words, it was cheaper for the corporations to pay the bonuses in 2017 than it would have been to pay them in 2018. Moreover, the TCJA provided a perverse incentive for the bonuses to be only a one-time occurrence, because in 2018 and beyond there would be increased incentives to maximize profits because of the reduced tax rate, which might not stay at that low level forever.
Nonetheless, bonuses accounted for only 2.7% of workers compensation in 2017, only a slight increase from 2.5% in 2016. Furthermore, this was a one-time blip as bonuses have declined since then.
If the TCJA were to have long-term or permanent effects on pay and the number of jobs, they would only be realized over a period of months or years, not immediately upon passage of the law, because making the necessary investments takes time. For the TCJA’s cut in the corporate tax rate to create a long-term, permanent increase in workers’ pay, corporations would need to use their tax savings for investments in improved equipment, worker skills training, or other steps that would improve workers’ productivity. To permanently increase the number of jobs, corporations would need to invest in increased production capacity. [1] Therefore, any compensation increases or growth in the number of jobs announced in late 2017 and early 2018 that were claimed to be results of the TCJA were public relations (PR) stunts, not effects of the TCJA.
Furthermore, corporate profits and cash reserves were high before the enactment of the TCJA, so corporations already had the resources needed to increase workers’ compensation or expand production if they wanted to. They weren’t increasing workers’ compensation or the number of jobs before the TCJA and they haven’t done so afterwards.
As background, corporate profits had risen dramatically from 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP, the total output of the U.S. economy) in 1990 to 9% in 2019, after having been largely in the range of 5% to 7% from 1952 to 1990. Furthermore, corporate taxes have been falling since the 1950s, so corporations have been keeping more of their profits. Taxes on corporate profits were 5% of GDP in 1952 and fell to 4% from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. They fell further to 3% of GDP from 1970 to 1980, and then to roughly 2% of GDP from 1982 until 2017. [2]
The bottom line is that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 has delivered none of the promised benefits for workers and low- and middle-income households, but has delivered much greater benefits than were promised (or admitted to) to wealthy individuals and to large, particularly multi-national, corporations. Increases in workers’ compensation that have occurred since the passage of the TCJA are ones that economic analysis indicates would have occurred anyway. Business investment and economic growth have not increased as promised. The promise of more fairly taxing multi-national corporations’ profits to increase tax revenue and discourage the shifting of profits and jobs overseas has been undermined. The multi-national corporations’ lobbying campaign got rules and regulations written for the implementation of the TCJA that significantly reduced the expected taxes on their profits. (See my previous post for more details on this.)
The truth about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is that despite the promises and public relations announcements that said otherwise, it has been a huge windfall for wealthy corporations and individuals, and of little or no benefit to workers. Historical experience and economic analysis indicated this would be the result in advance of TCJA’s enactment. The claims of benefits trickling down to workers from tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals had been convincingly rebutted. Nonetheless, proponents of the TCJA used this claim to argue for its tax cuts.
I believe many of the people who supported and voted for the TCJA knew what its actual effects would be. They lied about it because admitting that they wanted to enrich their political supporters and big campaign donors would have been unseemly and a political liability.
[1] Corser, M., Bivens, J., & Blair, H., Dec. 2019, “Still terrible at two: The Trump tax act delivered big benefits to the rich and corporations but nearly none to working families,” The Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute (https://www.epi.org/files/uploads/20191211_Trump-Tax-Bill-R6.pdf)
[2] Corser, M., Bivens, J., & Blair, H., Dec. 2019, see above
Lippitt's Policy and Politics Blog 
Mike, it is mystifying to me that Trump’s base will stick with him as he undermine’s their economic self-interest. Then again, we’ve known for sometime that people vote against their economic self-interest based on social issues backed by demagoguery and propaganda. You’re right that people, especially white, blue collar males, whose economic security has been trashed by Washington D.C.’s corporate policies including trade, are deeply disaffected and angry. They want to blow up the federal government and that’s exactly what Trump is doing. And their anger is easily misdirected at minorities and immigrants by the demagoguery of Trump and the right wing.
“The Base” must feel this? I am mystified at Trump’s popularity after things like the TCJA. There is a deep lesson here for America on the power of propaganda, the issues really driving the disaffected, and the depth of real racism in our country.