While Corporate Profits and Tax-Dodging Soared, Analysis Shows Just 6% of GOP 'Tax Scam' Benefits Went to Workers

A new six-month analysis of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts details how workers received little benefit from the plan, despite the savings many of their powerful corporate employers received.

The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) interviewed independent tax analysts and officials who were involved in the Republican Party’s effort to sell the so-called American Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to the public—and within their own party ranks. Progressive critics have consistently called the law nothing nothing more than a “tax scam.”

The GOP’s insistence on a tax law which included the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history—from 35 to 21 percent—resulted in companies saving about $150 billion in the first year after the passage in December 2017.

Trump and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan had spent months telling Americans they stood to save hundreds or even thousands of dollars in taxes, with Trump telling one crowd that the average family would see a pay raise of about $4,000, a benefit that would “trickle down” from employers’ corporate tax cuts.

In fact, CPI reporters Peter Cary and Allan Holmes wrote in The Guardian, companies instead distributed their savings amongst the few Americans who hold stock in their corporations:

Far from the $4,000 raises Trump alluded to, CPI found, the average paycheck went up about $6, or $233 per year.