If congressional Republican hand corporations one of the biggest tax cuts they've seen in our lifetimes, they'll use that money to invest in jobs and higher wages, right? Right?
Well, no.
The search for a CEO who will make those promises is a difficult one as most have been perfectly honest by saying they'll use the windfall to buy back stocks and pay dividends.
CEOs have stated this very clearly and very publicly but, for reasons that make me want to bang my head against a wall, Senate Republicans still "hope" that won't be the case.
“I hope they’ll do the right thing. What we want corporate America to do is what the smaller companies do,” [Senator Richard Shelby] said. “I believe a lot of that will go on, rather than buybacks and stuff like that. I hope that’s what will happen. We have to work the high road, and hope they do that. Some won’t, but I think a majority of the people will invest in the future and grow the economy.”
“The purpose of lowering the corporate rate to encourage job creation here,” Collins told HuffPost at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Thursday. “It is not to encourage stock buybacks, which tend to enrich the executives of a firm. So that would be disappointing if that was the case.”
Yes, that would be too bad.
Rather than simply hoping or guessing what corporate America will do, these senators could try asking them. They could also try reading the numerous news reports quoting CEOs who say they will buy back stocks and pay dividends.
If they truly want to see mega-corporations "do the right thing" like their smaller, mythical counterparts, they could have written their bill in a way that would compel them to, but they didn't. Eliminating taxes on overseas profits isn't going to help small companies that don't have overseas profits. Even the conservative National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) opposes their bill because it's too favorable to large multinational corporations.
It would be perfectly understandable if, like me, you feel like we're all going to be led off a cliff by some of the most incompetent dumbasses in the world who should have retired 20 years ago while their brains were still fully functioning.