You may remember all the glowing predictions made for the December 2017 tax cuts by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration: Wages would soar for the rank-and-file, corporate investments would surge, and the cuts would pay for themselves. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has just published a deep dive into the economic impact of the cuts in their first year, and emerges from the water with a different picture. The CRS finds that the cuts have had virtually no effect on wages, haven’t contributed to a surge in investment, and haven’t come close to paying for themselves. Nor have they delivered a cut to the average taxpayer.

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This purported “tax cut” was the GOP House’s only “achievement” of significance during its entire tenure under Donald Trump, a two-year Bacchanalian orgy of corporate-fueled gluttony that lasted until the voters summarily cast them out of power in the midterm elections of 2018. In the House, as in the Senate, no Democrats voted for the Act, with every Republican Senator ultimately responsible for its final passage, less one exception (Bob Corker, TN—now retired) voting for it. During their disastrous 2018 election cycle, few Republicans even dared to acknowledge it to their constituents on the campaign trail.

There was a reason for that. As summarized by Alan Pike in the Think Progress article:

Large corporations with shiny accounting departments ended up being the largest beneficiaries of the tax bill’s largesse, with the rate of tax they actually pay dropping by half in 2018, according to the CRS analysis. But the vanishingly insignificant comparative break Trump’s law gave workaday people lays the game bare. This tax bill is already reshaping the real-world economy in ways that limit the prospects of ordinary people, potentially reinforcing the structural inequities that adversely impact democratic society.

Michael Hiltzik, again, takes us through the study’s findings:

The report addresses predictions that the cuts would pay for themselves in economic growth. These forecasts were based on the notion that business investment would surge because the lowered corporate tax rate (to 21% from 35%) would increase investment from abroad, including the repatriation of U.S. corporate assets from foreign subsidiaries that had been stowed overseas. *** The CRS says that the cuts produced an increase of 0.3% at most in gross domestic product in 2018. For the cuts to pay for themselves, an increase of more than 6.7% would be necessary. In other words, the report says, the cuts produced less than one-twentieth of the economic gain needed to pay for themselves.

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Republicans had loudly touted an increase in the standard deduction and child credit which they had hoped would convince Americans that they were actually receiving some kind of benefit from this legislation. But the study analyzed the actual, real-world impact of those deductions and found them to be largely illusory.

Although the legislation increased the standard deduction and child credit, whatever tax reductions those would produce for families were “largely offset” by the elimination of personal exemptions, and limitations on itemized deductions such as those for state and local taxes.

Both Trump and his Republican enablers in the House and Senate had forecasted huge growth in our country’s GDP from the “tax cuts.” According to the study, these have also failed to materialize. Annual growth in year one after the cuts has simply matched the 2.9% rate in 2015—under President Barack Obama. Nor did the promised “offshore profits” being hidden away by American corporations find their way back to our shores as a result of this massive corporate giveaway—another claim used by Trump and the GOP to justify these cuts. In fact, the supposedly repatriated earnings were chiefly used for stock buybacks which do nothing but enrich the wealthiest of corporate shareholders.

So what happened to the other 97% of the money corporate accountants were handed by the government? A trillion dollars of it went to shareholders, as the law triggered a record wave of stock buybacks – an unproductive back-scratching activity that keeps the money firmly ensconced in upper-class hands that have little reason to spend that new cash back into the economy where working stiffs make their living.

Nor did wages for average Americans increase in any meaningful way—at all. The report concluded that: “There is no indication of a surge in wages in 2018 either compared to history or relative to GDP growth...“Ordinary workers had very little growth in wage rates.”

Hiltzik has the final word on this Republican monstrosity.

The bottom line, then, is becoming clearer with every quarter. The tax cuts did almost nothing for ordinary Americans and may even have cost them money. The apparent gains in their income were negligible and short-lived. Wealthy Americans reaped the benefits of lower taxes and higher dividends. The cuts had a negligible effect on U.S. economic growth while depriving the government of revenue.

Thanks to this legislation, Americans will be subjected to another dose of this Republican “tax policy” next April. Hopefully, this will allow them enough “lead time” before the 2020 election to assess just how much Donald Trump and the GOP are actually “concerned” about their economic futures.