Jim Tankersley:

It's not.

And it's also not what anybody thought, including proponents of the law, would be the natural outgrowth of a big tax cut. There's no economic theory that says, when you cut taxes, people get big bonus checks from their employers. It's just a thing that happened that sort of snowballed, in part because companies got wise that the president and Republicans would amplify.

Oh, look at this great company that is giving out bonuses based on the tax cuts. It was sort of a feedback loop. But that ended after a couple of months. And workers who got that bonus, which, again, is fantastic — and more money in people's pockets is always good — in this case, they're not seeing a sustained, well, next year, I'm going to get a bonus.

And the wage hikes haven't really followed. But the funny thing about that is, again, is we wouldn't necessarily expect that right away. You wouldn't think companies, unless they have like a union or someone really demanding strongly for them to give wage hikes from a tax cut, you wouldn't expect a company to do it on its own.

You would expect them instead to invest in better equipment, in more — other capital expenditures that make their company more productive. And then, when their workers get more productive, they have to pay them more because they're producing more.

And so, in a weird way, it's a bank shot of wage growth that we're looking at. And the bank shot is not appearing in the data yet.