Jayne: So far, average American sees little benefit from tax cuts

Maybe it would, if Walmart were not making a $20 billion investment in stock buybacks. And maybe if Walmart were not closing 63 Sam’s Club stores and laying off thousands of employees. And maybe if Walmart’s base pay for its 1.4 million employees were not below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

Walmart is only one corporation, even if it is the largest retailer in the United States. Surely the tax cuts for other companies are trickling down to salt-of-the-earth workers, right? Well, maybe not at Harley-Davidson, which is taking its tax savings, implementing a $700 million stock buyback plan, closing a plant in Kansas City, and increasing operations overseas.

But maybe elsewhere, so let’s ask Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who typically echoes Republican talking points, er, um, typically takes a nuanced and well-considered view of the issues.

“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 recently told the Economist. “In fact they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.”

Oh.

Well, what does he know? Let’s ask Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “There is nothing to suggest the tax law is lifting investment in any substantive way, at least so far,” he said.

It’s all a sham

OK, so maybe the tax cuts were nothing more than a sham to benefit stockholders and the wealthy. A Bloomberg analysis estimates that about 60 percent of tax-cut gains will go to shareholders, and 15 percent to employees.

Stock buybacks are not necessarily a bad thing. But when various analyses estimate that the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 80 percent of corporate stock, well, those buybacks are not doing a lot for the average worker.

Meanwhile, the average worker is paying for those tax cuts. From January through March, the U.S. Treasury borrowed $488 billion, a record for that time period. Last month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal deficit will approach $1 trillion next year, despite a fairly robust economy. Investors are reaping the benefits of tax cuts being purchased on the national credit card we all share.

All of which should be huge issues for the November midterms — provided the public has a long enough memory and cares enough to make them issues. That could be problematic. Getting the public to believe that tax policy is more important than whether or not football players stand for the national anthem can be a Sisyphean task.

But it is important. And it is curious that Herrera Beutler once supported a balanced-budget amendment under a Democratic president and now boasts about tax cuts that balloon the deficit. And along the way, most of us are not winning at all from the Republican tax cuts.