When President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law in December 2017, he hailed it as a major legislative victory — calling the cuts "rocket fuel" for the U.S. economy and claiming they would pay for themselves.

But according to an analysis released earlier this month by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the $1.5 trillion tax package has had a minimal economic impact.

"It's no surprise," says Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, adding independent analysis by other groups arrived at the same conclusion more than a year ago. "Nearly everyone who looked at this, other than the Trump administration itself, felt that this would have very little effect on the economy."

Trump praised the measure as "a bill for the middle class and a bill for jobs." The administration put a number on what it would mean for workers, saying the average American family would benefit to the tune of between $4,000 and $9,000 a year thanks to a slashed corporate tax rate. Gleckman (@howard_gleckman) says companies took that benefit and handed it primarily to their shareholders, not their employees.

"Corporate investment did bump up a little bit, but not very much. Companies didn't give employees raises, not right away," he tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. "So what do the companies do with all that money? They bought back stock and they gave shareholders dividends. And essentially what that says is that the companies couldn't think of anything productive to do with the money."

Interview Highlights

On the bill's impact in the months after it was passed

"Normally, if you saw a big piece of legislation that affected the economy, you'd see an inflection point. You'd see something dramatically changing from the time before the law passed till the time after it passed. And that just didn't happen here. What we saw was for the first couple of quarters in the first half of 2018, there was a little bit of bump in investment. There was a little bit of a bump in GDP. But the investment bump disappeared. Wage growth never really happened — there was some small increase in wages, but again, it was pretty much the same as it was before the law passed. So we just didn't see much that you could tie to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act."