Republican strategists say the GOP's tax cuts are less popular than they should be because people simply haven't noticed yet that their take-home pay has increased by "$40 to $60," but there is someone who has definitely noticed a significant difference: Wall Street
The Associated Press reports that big banks saw their tax bills drop by nearly $3.6 billion in just the first quarter of the year and some of them saw tax rates that are actually lower than the 20 percent rate set by Republicans.
Big publicly traded banks — such JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America — typically kick off the earnings season. Their reports for the January-March quarter are giving investors and the public their first glimpse into how the new tax law is impacting Corporate America. [...]
The results released over the past week show how sharply those rates have dropped. JPMorgan Chase said it had a first-quarter tax rate of 18.3 percent, Goldman Sachs paid just 17.2 percent in taxes, and the highest-taxed bank of the six majors, Citigroup, had a tax rate of 23.7 percent. This is just one quarter’s results, however, and bank executives at the big six firms have estimated that their full-year tax rates will be something closer to 20 percent to 22 percent.
This would normally be the part where Republicans tell you these banks are going to invest their savings and hire more workers, but these are banks. They don't actually produce anything of value and the financial industry is increasingly replacing humans with artificial intelligence systems.
Deep down these institutions have to know this can't last forever, but it may not truly sink in until this time next year when we find out that federal revenue has already dropped by more than a hundred billion.