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One of the most promising characteristics of last Tuesday's election results was that the abominable tax-cut package that was supposed to be the golden ticket for Republicans turned out to be essentially worthless, if not a demonstrable deadweight, to Republican candidates up and down the ballot. If that means that Republican voters are finally coming out from under the noxious spell of tax-cuts-uber-alles supply-side voodoo, that would be an epochal development for all of our politics.

On Tuesday, The New York Times published a report that seems to indicate that's the case. The evidence is becoming overwhelming.

Those results weren’t a surprise. Economists across the ideological spectrum predicted the new law would fuel consumer spending, in classic fashion: When the government borrows money and dumps it into the economy, growth tends to accelerate. But Republicans did not sell the law as a sugar-high stimulus. They sold it as a refashioning of the incentives in the American economy — one that would unleash more investment, better efficiency and higher wages, along with enough growth to offset any revenue lost to the government from lower tax rates. Ten months after the law took effect, that promised “supply-side” bump is harder to find than the sugar-high stimulus. It’s still early, but here’s what the numbers tell us so far.

And now, this, from the good folks at the Department of Inevitability:

Proponents of the tax overhaul said it would supercharge the recent lackluster pace of business spending on long-term investments like buildings, factories, equipment and technology. Such spending is crucial to keeping economic growth strong. And strong growth is central to Republican claims that the tax cuts would ultimately pay for themselves...

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

Cheerleaders for the tax cut argued that the heart of the law — cutting and restructuring taxes for corporations — would give the economy a positive bump, giving companies incentives to invest more, hire more workers and pay higher wages.

Skeptics said that the money companies saved through tax cuts would merely increase corporate profits, rather than trickling down to workers. JPMorgan Chase analysts estimate that in the first half of 2018, about $270 billion in corporate profits previously held overseas were repatriated to the United States and spent as a result of changes to the tax code. Some 46 percent of that, JPMorgan Chase analysts said, was spent on $124 billion in stock buybacks.

The flow of repatriated corporate cash is just one tributary in what has become a flood of payouts to shareholders, both as buybacks and dividends. Such payouts are expected to hit almost $1.3 trillion this year, up 28 percent from 2017, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs analysts.

Look, there's a whole pile of money over there! Grab it before it does what it's supposed to do! I guarantee you everybody who got a dime out of these payouts believe they earned every penny of it. No wonder the Republicans couldn't sell this lemon. People may be wising up. And, not for nothing, but Democratic politicians better be aware of this, too.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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