Wherever Donald Trump’s tax cut was going, not much of it was going to ordinary families, and that not for long, since the individual-tax-cut part of the law expires at the end of 2025, in order to keep its handouts to corporations and small-business owners from shooting the federal deficit to Uranus rather than just to Mars. (Where it can catch a ride home, one presumes, in the Tesla that Elon Musk just shot into space).

But now, courtesy of Goldman Sachs, we know where the tax cut is really going. Surprise! It’s paying for stock repurchases by corporations, as Corporate America despairs of investing in much other than dividing the pie provided by near-record profitability into fewer and larger pieces.

Buyback announcements are up 22% this year to $67 billion in just six weeks, Goldman said in a note to clients. This follows a report by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt finding that 83% of large companies don’t expect the tax cut to boost salaries at all — just help pay for small bonuses companies like WalMart WMT, -1.02% and AT&T T, -0.48% gave workers, which reporters soon discovered were, themselves, skewed toward higher-paid, longer-tenured employees in many cases.

And it comes as Goldman finds companies have raised guidance on re-investment in their businesses — the putative reason for cutting corporate taxes at all — only 3%.

“The buyback window has re-opened and firms are taking advantage of the recent correction,” Goldman’s David Kostin wrote. “The [Goldman] Buyback Desk reported that last week was the most active week in its history. One notable example is Cisco CSCO, -1.38% , which has $68 billion of overseas cash, ranking third after Apple AAPL, -3.17% and Microsoft MSFT, -1.24% . Last week CSCO released earnings results, raised its buyback authorization by $25 billion, and announced plans to repurchase its entire authorization of $31 billion during the next six to eight quarters, equal to roughly 15% of its current market cap.”

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Goldman’s note comes as the market is still taking the measure of Trump’s plans to both cut taxes and boost spending, with a fairly explosive combined impact on the federal deficit. Instead of being 3% of gross domestic product — a level that all but guarantees the national debt will grow slower than the economy’s pre-inflation growth rate — the deficit will go to 5%, which all but assures the debt gets bigger, somewhat harder to manage, and probably leads to a drop in national income in the future, according to Jason Furman, President Barack Obama’s chief economist.

The problem is that most estimates of the spending burst’s positive impact on growth are fairly small. Goldman thinks it will add 0.7 percentage points to inflation-adjusted GDP growth this year and 0.6 points next year, before flattening out. That’s less than the impact on the deficit — in essence, if forecasts other than the Trump administration’s projections are right, we charged a little bit of extra growth on a credit card. And we’ll borrow more to make it happen than the growth is worth.

But even if the tax cut causes little growth, its impact on corporate profits is real and meaningful — and now twofold.

Consensus earnings estimates per share for this year for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index rose about 7%, to $158, after the tax cut passed. It wasn’t complicated: If you take the same pretax earnings, then reduce the statutory tax rate by 14 percentage points, you boost after-tax profits at least 7%.

(Goldman says companies that have said anything about it on fourth-quarter earnings calls expect their effective tax rate to fall to 23% from 28%). And if the number of shares drops more than expected, EPS will rise even more.

So there’s more wealth for people who own equities, even if there is little to no new growth, or much tax savings or new wage growth for people who do the work. In practical terms, it’s another reason to buy stocks, albeit a minor one.

Worse, there’s not much sign of new investment, so there’s little reason to believe in the above-forecast growth the administration insists will make the tax cut pay off.

On the other hand, it’s also too soon for the big negative that I and others foresee — an unsustainable surge in asset prices and luxury goods (it’s a great time to be selling art, for example) that flow from too much cash sloshing around at the top, creating the conditions for the next downturn.

It’s early days, yes, but the signs point to pretty much exactly what skeptics of the tax bill predicted — an upward redistribution of wealth with little obvious macro payoff.

Surprise!