“On the whole, the tax cut bill helps workers. It’s just not massive tax cuts to multinational corporations that do it,” Sen. Marco Rubio wrote in an op-ed for National Review. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Rubio walks back criticism of GOP tax law ‘Overall, the Republican tax-cut bill has been good for Americans,’ the Florida Republican wrote.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is walking back some of the criticism he leveled against the new Republican tax law earlier this week, now claiming the measure “has been good for Americans” overall.

“On the whole, the tax cut bill helps workers. It’s just not massive tax cuts to multinational corporations that do it,” Rubio wrote in an op-ed for National Review published Wednesday.


“Overall, the Republican tax-cut bill has been good for Americans. That is why I voted for it,” he added. “But it could have been even better for American workers and their families.”

That assessment marks a stark departure from Rubio’s criticism of parts of the law in an interview with The Economistpublished Monday, in which the Florida Republican questioned how much the legislation is really helping the working class.

“There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers,” Rubio told The Economist. “In fact they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.”

Rubio’s latest appraisal of the tax law may be seen as act of political damage control following blowback from some conservatives over his less-than-glowing review of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Republicans muscled through Congress in December.

A major plank of the party’s electoral strategy in the upcoming midterm elections will be trumpeting tax breaks and bonuses to middle-class employees that Republicans say the law facilitated, and the White House and GOP members of Congress have already expressed interest in attempting to pass a second round of tax cuts to woo voters.

Rubio, however, struck back at the idea that he has been less than supportive of the overall tax law. “Not only did I not back down on tax cut, I doubled down & added detail for rationale,” the Florida senator tweeted on Wednesday.

Michael Needham, Rubio’s chief of staff, also stated that the senator has not shifted his position, and pointed to Rubio’s past efforts to push other tax provisions that can more directly help individual Americans than deep corporate tax cuts. “Senator Rubio’s op-ed published in National Review today expands upon his comments to the Economist and is consistent with his tax policy views spanning all the way back to the 2015 Rubio-Lee tax plan,” Needham said.

He added, “The positions have been the same throughout.”