WASHINGTON — There are good ways to start measuring how much the Trump tax cuts might be helping American workers. Tracking the bonus announcements flowing from corporations is not one of them.
Those announcements, which include $2,000 in stock grants for Apple employees, up to $1,000 for certain workers at Walmart and $1,000 bonuses for Bank of America employees, are both real money and smart marketing. President Trump and top Republican lawmakers have praised many of the companies that are disclosing tax-cut-fueled bonuses and wage hikes.
For the most part, though, they are not indicative of the windfalls that companies are reaping from the $1.5 trillion tax law — and how much of that money that might trickle through to workers in the years to come.
Companies are acknowledging this in their fourth-quarter earnings reports and other financial disclosures, which earmark just a sliver of their future tax savings for direct and indirect investments in workers.
Bank of America’s bonuses will cost the bank $145 million in 2018, or about 5 percent of the nearly $2.7 billion in savings it is expected to reap in 2018 from a lower, 21 percent corporate tax rate. Apple’s bonuses will cost $300 million, a fraction of the $40 billion, at least, that the tech giant is saving from a single provision in the law, which allows it to return earnings held overseas at less than half the rate it would have paid under the old system.
