There was no repatriating more than $1 Trillion from off shore banks. It was an accounting fiction. U.S. corporations have large assets overseas. Some of these assets reflect past investments made for fundamental business reasons - e.g., auto plants built to serve foreign markets. But a lot of those overseas assets reflect tax avoidance strategies.
Here’s how that works: a U.S. company manipulates transactions with an overseas subsidiary in a low-tax jurisdiction like Ireland so as to make profits, wherever they’re actually earned, appear on the books of the subsidiary rather than the home company. For example, the company may pay inflated prices for components it buys from the subsidiary, or assign the subsidiary patents and licenses on which it pays large royalties. These shifted profits then show up in the data as investments abroad, even though they may not correspond to anything real, as is clearly the case for much foreign investment in Ireland.
Now, when the U.S. reduces its corporate tax rate, this reduces the incentive to engage in such schemes: corporations don’t have to go to Ireland to avoid taxes, they can do it right here in the U.S.A. So you would expect the tax cut to lead to repatriation of assets, and that’s indeed what happened. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces our balance of payments statistics, had a very helpful box on the effects of the TCJA in its latest
report on international transactions that included a striking chart on the impact on multinational corporations (Figure 2). Following the tax law’s enactment, U.S. firms had their subsidiaries pay the home company huge dividends; the counterpart of these dividends, on paper, was a sharp drop in investment overseas. Nothing in reality was changed.
Wages rose because a number of states raised their minimum wage.
Inflation has been ~2% annual for more than a decade.