The best coverage of the bill that is actually not called "The Tax Cut and Jobs Act" was provided by Greg Leiserson of Equitable Growth. Now as we approach the one-year anniversary, we can actually begin estimating what the tax cut's effects truly were. To get ready to do so, remember Greg's primer on how to assess: Greg Leiserson: Assessing the economic effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: "An assessment... should focus on the impact of the legislation on wage rates for workers, the return on business investment, and the size of future federal budget deficits...
...these will determine the impact... on the economic well-being of the public and the fiscal sustainability of the law.... The law’s corporate tax cuts are primarily benefitting shareholders. Wage rates would need to increase about 1 percent above the level that would have prevailed absent the law to shift the benefits of the corporate tax cuts from shareholders to workers.... There is no indication that anything of this scale has yet occurred.... Research suggests that only a small portion of these corporate tax cuts will be shifted to workers from shareholders even without taking the effects of rising federal budget deficits into account, and most of those gains will accrue to more highly paid workers. The increase in budget deficits... will require offsetting fiscal policies. The net impact... will... [be] the combination of the effects of the tax cuts as enacted and these future as-yet-unspecified fiscal policy changes...
#shouldread
