When Republicans were selling their tax plan last year, they insisted that despite the fact that it sure looked like the vast majority of the benefits were weighted toward corporate America, in reality it was the common man who would come out the winner. In the G.O.P.’s telling, chopping the corporate tax rate to 20 percent would end up helping the middle class because companies would use their vast tax savings to raise wages for rank-and-file workers. But as anyone outside of the G.O.P. and the White House knew at the time, corporations were actually much more likely to spend their largesse on stock buybacks, enriching not average Americans but shareholders and senior executives; we knew this because 1) studies showed it was what had happened in the past, and 2) companies literally said that’s what they were going to do. (Last month, Bank of America C.E.O. Brian Moynihan told investors that the “largest portion” of tax savings would “flow to the bottom line through dividends and share buybacks.”) But hey, maybe we were all just being cynical—maybe companies really would spend their extra billions on employees rather than those at the top. Maybe we just needed to wait and see. Now, two months after the tax bill passed, do we all owe Republicans and Team Trump an apology?

Not so much! According to The New York Times, since the bill’s passage, companies have set a new record for buybacks in a single quarter, announcing plans for $178 billion in planned share repurchases. And they’re not stopping there; Apple alone is reportedly expected to green light another $30 billion in share purchases in April. “I’m expecting buybacks to get to a record for 2018,” Howard Silverblatt, a senior index analyst with S&P Dow Jones Indices, told the Times. “And if I’m disappointed, there’s a lot of people with me.” While some companies have made big shows of announcing one-time bonuses and other planned investments, so far the vast majority of the benefits have gone to investors, a move that experts say will disproportionately enrich the richest 10 percent of American households, which own 84 percent of all stocks. That, in turn, is expected to worsen economic inequality.

Never one to let reality stand in its way, the White House is claiming average Americans just have to sit tight and wait for the “middle-class tax plan” to actually benefit the middle class. “Right now we’re going to have an adjustment where you see probably more dividends and share buybacks than wage increases,” Kevin Hassett, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said at a recent news conference. “But going forward, we’re going to see a lot of capital formation and wage growth.” That is not, as the Times points out, what happened in 2005, when George W. Bush backed a plan to grant corporations a tax holiday, allowing them to repatriate earnings stashed abroad—that plan ended in an overall reduction in U.S. employment, even as executive compensation and buybacks increased dramatically. But hey, maybe this time will be different!