Yeah, these one-time bonuses are just for PR.
Yes. He was anticipating Trump’s tax cut even then.
I didn’t pay much attention to the tax cut discussions last year because the media told me it wouldn’t be much. But I just ran the calculator and I was surprised how much it will be. We seem to be in some sort of sweet spot. (No, I’m not actually a corporation with $200 billion in foreign profits.)
Didn’t really need it, but umm, I’ll take it.
Well, I mean, that’s the demographic the tax cuts were aimed at. :D
Woohoo!
Because of this news, I’ve decided to give “the help” a one-time bonus. But I’m going to fire a few of them now.
Huh, this is fucking weird. So our annual raises just went out, and they were the same as all our other annual raises were. I thought my company was supposed to give out massive raises due to the tax cut, because that’s like totally what businesses do?
Out of curiosity, which calculator?
I think there was a WaPo one and a NYT one. Do a Google search.
The WaPo one has nice color coding. Definitely right in the sweet spot for our state and the married with kids option.
We’re just passing the debt onto our kids. With interest.
Which wouldn’t really matter so much if most of the foregone revenues (or even better, directed spending) went to help the large majority of the people (in the latter case, as block grants to the states for infrastructure repair/improvements, education, addiction treatment and health care, etc.). The national debt will never ever have to be paid off all at once.
I’ll just teach them to default, heh.
So has anyone else noticed that the medical deduction area of a federal Schedule A has changed THIS year. They have changed the computation to use 7.5% instead of 10% for the average taxpayer. That should help some people save money, it will help me.
Interesting. It used to be 7.5% of AGI, but they’d changed it in recent years.
Last year it was 10% if you were under 65, 7.5% if you were 65 or older. In 2017 it is 7.5% for everybody.
The ACA change the deduction to 10 percent as one of the pay-fors. The Republican tax bill dropped it back to 7.5% for 2017 and 2018 and then I believe it returns back to 10%. Originally an earlier version of GOP plan eliminated the deduction entirely but they went opposite direction in final bill.
Yup, a google search says just that. This is two year change due to the latest tax bill.
Home Depot is giving employees a $1000 bonus.
Upon announcing the employee bonus, Home Depot CEO Craig Menear said: “This incremental investment in our associates was made possible by the new tax reform bill.”
Maybe us libtards were premature …
Oh wait.
If they’ve been there 20 years.
Even if Home Depot were handing out $1,000 to each of its approximately 380,000 hourly workers, that would come to $380 million. In December, before Congress voted on the corporate tax cut but when it seemed to be on its way to enactment, Home Depot announced a share buyback program valued at $15 billion.
Think of it this way: A Home Depot employee with, say, five years of work and a full time job there will get a bonus of $300. That’s a bonus of 14 cents per hour over a year.
The $15-billion share buyback works out to about $12.50 per share. So someone with 80 shares will benefit about as much as someone who has worked an hourly job at Home Depot for 20 years or more.
The bonuses are a smokescreen. “Look at us share a small percentage of the wealth with our employees. Just this one time! Don’t expect another bonus!”
One of the persistent truths about the ring wing is they don’t understand scale very well and thus don’t understand the relative magnitude of various issues. I saw a report, don’t know where, that there is a group collecting the various press releases and is claiming that there will be about 3 million bonuses paid at about $1,000 each.
First up there are some issues we’ve been mentioning here: do all the various bonuses actually add up to a number that high, what amount will the average worker be getting, and how the bonuses compare with what would be normal after a decent year that caps 8 years of sustained growth. Also, why are these bonuses instead of raises? The corporate tax cut is permanent but bonuses, that’s just one time.
But there’s another issue here, which is, even if everything the right wing claims is true is true, these bonuses amount to mere pennies on the dollar. Although the net effect of the tax cuts is going to be at least $1.5 trillion over the next ten years, the gross is $5.5 trillion in tax cuts with $4 trllion in tax increases. Of the $5.5 trillion gross tax cuts, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, the amount of the corporate tax cuts is $2.2 trillion over 10 years. Which means that on average, corporations will receive tax cuts of $220 billion per year.
How does that compare to the bonuses? Well even if the 3 million figure is true and even if the $1000 per worker is true, that comes out to $3 billion. Which is 1.3%. So even if all the right wing boosting is true, workers will get 1.3 cents on the dollar for one year, and corporations will get 98.7 cents on the dollar this year and 100 cents on the dollar if they don’t continue the raises.
I think when people talk about the tax cuts flowing to workers, they are not expecting a paltry 1.3 cents on the dollar. I’m pretty sure some of the Trump folks have claimed that “most” of the corporate tax cuts would go to workers, which would be $110 billion. So at about $3 billion, we are 2.6% of the way there! Hooray! We just need to multiply the number of corporations of comparable size giving out raises of comparable size to a comparable number of workers by a factor of 40. No problem!
Of course, my pedantic math is obvious to most of you. It should be obvious to the right wing but to many of them, it’s not. This general problem with understanding scale permeates our economic debates.