Scuzz
2033
Well, it would depend on your income and on what they ended up doing with increasing the child tax credits. Since some of that can be refundable there are those who could do better.
My accountant told me after the law passed that I was the first person he had run a check who was going to owe more.
LockerK
2034
Something sure is trickling down, but it ain’t money.
rowe33
2035
Too bad no one in the Republican party will answer for this. Probably blame Obama or Clinton somehow. Or just call reports about wage stagnation “fake news” like usual.
Look, it’s not their fault wages are stagnating. Employers want to pay more, but they can’t because of all those immigrants stealing our jobs with cheap labor. The only way to solve that is to BUILD THE WALL. Fake News. No Collusion.
Nesrie
2037
The worst part is when employers provide an excuse for why they’re not giving wages when times are good and some employees actually believe them. Most of them are flush with cash, cutting costs and not paying their employees. Until people start jumping ship and shift to other jobs and places of employment, they have no incentive to try and keep them. Of course then they’re wind up with an opening and start whining about how they can’t fill and how they can’t find any skilled employees.
As Trump said - “I’ve just made all of you a lot richer”
Using a measure that includes stock options realized (as described below), CEO pay grew a remarkable 17.6 percent from 2016 to 2017, reaching $18.9 million on average in 2017. CEO compensation grew strongly because of the large stock awards given to CEOs and their ability to sell previously granted stock options in a rising stock market.
rowe33
2039
Trickle down, trickle down, can’t spare a nickel now.
We really need a good cleansing of the ultra wealthy, like a nobility purge from the Malazan books.
From the article:
How we can solve the problem: Policy solutions that would limit and reduce incentives and the ability of CEOs > to extract economic concessions without hurting the economy include the following:
Reinstate higher marginal income tax rates at the very top.
Set corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation.
Set a cap on compensation and tax anything over the cap.
Allow greater use of “say on pay,” which allows a firm’s shareholders to vote on top executives’ compensation.
I don’t like the cap on compensation idea (even though it’s basically how progressive taxes work, so maybe just the wording is awkward) but the other 3 sound solid.
Really, many more high-income brackets and marginal rates that escalate to 90% go a long way to preventing runaway wealth accumulation.
Again, that shiny moment of the 50s that these MAGA folks seem to yearn for was when we were taxing the living fuck out of the wealthy.
Just need Europe to burn itself down and China to get colonized by opium traders again, and MAGA!
Well, insofar as they (or rather, their lawyers and tax accountants) weren’t finding super-creative ways of dodging those tax rates. So I doubt many people were actually paying that marginal 90% rate or whatever it was. Still, I think effective tax rates were more progressive (although there was no indexing back then, which sucked if there was any inflation at all).
Limit, reduce or even just ban corps from paying executives in stock options could help too (would also put a brake on companies buying their stock back solely to inflate the stock price and instead reinvest their profits in their employees, R&D or etc.)
JonRowe
2047
I feel the same way. The cap idea doesn’t sound great. The “say on pay” sounds great too, but with a caveat that the CEO has to abstain from the vote if they own a large amount of shares.
I think the best thing would be not to be to tax companies over a threshold, but to give tax breaks to companies under a lower threshold.
Ex-SWoo
2048
It’s very difficult to develop policy that can’t be gamed - for example, I think it’ll be fairly easy for large companies to spin up subsidiaries to make sure they are under that threshold to be eligible for tax breaks.
Sure, but that is life. You keep working on it, making it better and making adjustments.
NY Times semi-paywall, but you probably have guessed what the article says already. Capital investment increase did happen earlier this year but is slowing. Very little wage growth or expansion in hiring. And lots of stock buybacks.
Oghier
2052
It was not supposed to change corporate behavior. Nobody in the corporate world thought it would lead to more hiring, as everyone understands that unmet demand is the driver, not available capital.
The idea that this tax cut would spark hiring is just a slightly different take on trickle-down economics, giving money to ‘job creators,’ and the other bullshit used to sell Reaganomics to a GOP base willing to believe whatever they are told. The businesses and individual donors understood its actual purpose.
Stock buybacks increase the share price, and therefore the compensation of everyone whose job title starts with a C. Hiring new employees adds to your cost structure, which often has the opposite effect.
