Oops, they did it again. After Republicans rammed through their big tax cut, there were a rash of stories about corporations using the tax break to give their workers bonuses. Have the media learned nothing from the Carrier debacle? After all, companies have every incentive to curry favor with a sitting administration by attributing nice things they would have done in any case to Dear Leader’s glorious policies. Amid tightening labor markets lots of firms would have been trying to attract or hold workers by offering a bit of money; why not use the occasion to hype something that raises your after-tax profits?

Anyway, now we have enough information to start assessing the real impact of the tax cut. No, it isn’t going into wages; you should never have expected that in the short run anyway. What’s more, we aren’t even seeing the kind of response that would raise wages in the long run. And it’s even possible, as I’ll explain, that the tax cut could reduce wages.

1. The optimists’ theory of the case

What was the theory of the case for those who believed, or at least claimed to believe, that a cut in corporate taxes would be passed through into wages? The story, as told by people like Kevin Hassett or the Tax Foundation, was that (a) markets for goods and labor are close to perfectly competitive, and (b) America is part of a global capital market that more or less equalizes after-tax rates of return. The idea, then, was that by reducing the rate of taxes on corporate profits, America would attract inflows of capital from the rest of the world. A rising capital stock would drive pre-tax returns on capital down and, by increasing competition for labor, drive wages up. In the long run, they claimed, all the benefits would go to workers.

There were multiple reasons not to believe in this story. One reason is that the U.S., if only because of its sheer size, doesn’t face a perfectly elastic supply of capital from the rest of the world; even in the long run, we would expect a tax cut to raise after-tax profits. Another is that we’re nowhere close to perfect competition: a lot of corporate profits represent some kind of monopoly rent, and there’s no reason to expect capital inflows to compete those rents away.