The Center for Public Integrity spent six months studying the process that created the tax act. Among its findings:
- Corporations, which drove the train, got even more of a tax cut than they wanted. Yet they refused to promise that their huge tax break would hike worker wages. Medium-sized and big businesses got something they had only dreamed of — though in provisions so badly written one tax expert called them a “travesty.”
- Rich Republicans lobbied Trump at a Manhattan fundraiser and got 2.6 percentage points lopped off their highest tax bracket.
- Deficit hawks, that is, those opposed to creating any new federal debt, hemmed and hawed and finally folded, as one commentator put it, “like a cheap suit.”
- An idea that would have raised $1 trillion and paid for much of the tax cuts was soundly defeated by a powerful business lobby.
- Republicans used $1.5 trillion in what some call accounting gimmicks to either hide the true cost of the bill or help justify their votes.
- The bill was drafted in secret, partly to keep it from Congress’s own members who, it was feared, would leak it to lobbyists.
- A key nonpartisan agency that tried to give an honest assessment of the cost of the bill was brazenly cut out of the picture.
...the bill, with its 21 percent corporate tax rate, was first and foremost a gift to multinationals. They had wanted cuts in the corporate tax rate for foreign and domestic profits for decades. Everything else flowed from that: the tax cuts for smaller businesses known as “pass-throughs,” which had been their holy grail, and the cuts for individuals, which were needed to sell the bill to voters.
(The tax cuts for individuals expire in 2025, in order to hide the costs should they be made permanent; if they aren't, by 2027 83% of the cuts go to the top 1%)...
An obstacle for Feehery was that a corporate rate cut was not an easy sell to the American public, especially Trump voters, who were thought to have a deep dislike for both corporations and their chief executives. Feehery’s job was to convince these voters the rate cut would produce more jobs and higher wages.
The “more jobs” effect was not universally accepted. One report, by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies in August 2017, looked at 92 large publicly traded U.S. corporations. ExxonMobil Corp. paid an effective tax rate of 13.6 percent from 2008 to 2015 while it cut one third of its global workforce, the study said. AT&T paid 8.1 percent in taxes while cutting 80,000 jobs over the same period. Meanwhile, stock buybacks boomed, and the average CEO pay increased 18 percent...
“One of the things we found is the Trump voter likes Trump, but doesn’t love Corporate America,” Feehery said. “Trump has so much credibility with the Trump voter that he can make the sell.”
