The bill signed into law by Trump on 22 December 2017 cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21%, the largest such rate cut in US history. “The most excited group out there are big CEOs,” said the White House economic adviser Gary Cohn as the measure was making its way through Congress in 2017.
Yes, and that long-overdue cut in the corporate tax rate made our companies more competitive in Europe and Asia, where the corporate tax ranges from 18-21%. Furthermore, as part of the cut from 35% to 21%, the tax-cut bill ended the foreign-income loophole so that American companies can no longer pay zero taxes on their overseas income. And in a very smart move to attract American capital parked overseas to come back to the U.S., the bill included a provision that offers a repatriated income tax rate of 13.5% on money that American companies shift back to the U.S., which is one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that we have seen so much capital come back to the U.S.
But the fears of ordinary workers in regard to those promised higher wages were realized.
Nonsense. Just go read the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly Employment Situation Report from January 2017 onward until the pandemic hit. Wages increased more under Trump in three years than they did under Obama in eight years. Anyone can check this fact for themselves, and any statistic that weasel-words to avoid this fact is misleading. I am not saying Obama did a bad job with the economy. I think he did a pretty decent job, better than Bush did, but Trump has done even better (again, minus the pandemic).
The bulk of the $150bn the tax cut put into the hands of corporations in 2018 went into shareholder dividends and stock buy-backs, both of which line the pockets of the 10% of Americans who own 84% of the stocks.
That is horrible math. You can't use gross numbers when you're talking about tax cuts, rates, and incomes. If Joe A makes $50K and gets a 10% tax cut, his net income increases by $5K. If Joe B makes $200K per year and gets a 5% tax cut, his net income increases by $10K, but obviously it would be silly and misleading to say that such a tax cut "favored the rich," since the middle-class got to keep a much large share/percentage of his income. The fact that the rich guy gets more money is just a function of math, and it does not change the fact that the middle-income guy is getting to keep a large share of his income.
Anyone who want to learn something in 2 minutes can go to the individual income tax tables for 2017 and 2018 and can see that by far, by far the biggest rate cuts in individual income tax rates in the Trump tax cuts went to the middle class. Moreover, the Trump tax cuts took a big bite out of rich people's wallets by capping the SALT deduction at $10K.
And why in the world do liberals complain because some companies have used some of their tax-cut savings to buy back some of their own stock so as to reduce the influence and cost of shareholders? People who do this know little about business. On the one hand, liberals--as do many conservatives--correctly complain about the harmful influence that shareholders often have on companies. Shareholders often pressure companies to reduce employee benefits and to curb or delay raises in order to cut labor costs, etc., etc.
So if you work for a company that is able to buy back some of its own stock, you should be very happy about this, because when a company does this, it is reducing, or ending, the influence of shareholders and also reducing the number of people who must be paid dividends/returns, which leaves more money for R&D, expansion, raises, better benefits, increased reserve capital, etc.
