Worker Bonuses Fell Sharply As Corporations Reaped Tax-Cut Billions

After a flurry of press releases last year touting all the bonuses that would come when Republicans passed their tax scam, it turns out corporations scaled back on worker bonuses in 2019, and drastically. But they’re still reaping the benefits of the GOP tax scam, according to a Tuesday Wall Street Journal report.

Compared to this time last year, worker bonuses have dropped by a stunning 24 percent, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The drop is the largest decrease on record, dating back to 2005.

Since the tax scam was signed into law in December 2017, Trump and Republicans have highlighted anecdotal evidence from corporate press releases to promote its greatness. In January 2018, for example, the Trump administration praised Walmart for giving out bonuses, even as the company was closing more than 60 stores.

But now the bonuses “appear to largely have been a one-time windfall,” and “were a short-term jolt rather than a sustained change,” reported the Journal.

Even the hoopla surrounding bonuses turned out to be more noise than substance. In the end, the average bonus for workers in 2018 amounted to one penny more than the average bonus in 2017, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute.

Meanwhile, a recent report from the Congressional Research Service showed the tax scam did little to improve the overall economy or workers’ wages. “There is no indication of a surge in wages in 2018 either compared to history or relative to GDP growth,” the report states.

But the lower corporate tax rate Republicans doled out to big business is continuing whether or not corporations hand out bonuses.

In 2018, corporations paid $91 billion less to the U.S. Treasury than the previous year. In fact, corporations paid only seven percent in taxes on their profits, the lowest effective tax rate in more than 70 years, according to Yahoo News.

Some corporations, like Amazon, Netflix, and IBM either paid no taxes or received a rebate.

And some corporations are raking in profits while laying off Americans across the country.

In one egregious example, Walmart was handed a $2 billion tax break, then turned around and slashed more than 550 jobs in North Carolina.

AT&T cut 23,000 jobs despite getting a $21 billion windfall from Republicans.

“Once again, we’re faced with more evidence that the GOP tax law was a scam cooked up by conservatives in Congress to protect the interests of the wealthy at the expense of American workers,” Dana Bye, campaign director of the Tax March, told Shareblue. “We will not allow these atrocities to become our new normal.”

Republicans wrote a tax law to benefit corporations while leaving families out in the cold. And the law is working exactly as intended.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: Donald Trump meets with then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan on Capitol Hill as they promoted Republican tax cut in 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts