Tax Cuts and Bonuses

You won't hear much about this on the mainstream media, but even before the recently passed tax reform bill has gone into effect hundreds of thousands of average Americans were already benefiting from it.

Some corporations are giving out thousand dollar bonuses to their employees, others are raising their minimum wage to $15.00 and hour, and others are planning on expanding their businesses and creating more jobs.

It started with AT&T expanding its bonus program to an additional 200,000 staffers getting $1,000 apiece.

Next came Boeing announcing a gift of $300 million in investment in its employee-related charitable program “to support our heroes, our homes and our future.”

Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bancorp announced they would raise their minimum wage to $15 in the New Year, with Fifth Third kicking in an additional bonus of $1,000 to 13,000 employees.

Comcast NBC Universal anted up $1,000 bonuses to more than 100,000 non-executive employees, announcing the move was not only tied, like all the others, to the tax cut but to the Federal Communications Commission’s elimination of government regulation of the Internet. Comcast NBC Universal Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Brian L. Roberts added the company plans to spend more than $50 billion in the next five years on infrastructure investments that he expects will create “thousands of new direct and indirect jobs.”

In fact, before the bill was even passed, Kroger Chief Executive Officer W. Rodney McMullen offered that the legislation would influence his company “to continue to invest in our business, which will grow jobs.”

No Democrat in the House or Senate voted for it. In fact the opposition to it was fairly fierce. Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the bill an “Armageddon” for the American people and insisted that it was "the worst bill in history." The Democrats' main argument was that by dropping the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% we'll just be making the rich richer and doing nothing to help the middle class.

It may be that under the new tax reform law the cumulative tax break for some will only be a couple of hundred dollars but add that to enhanced job creation and thousand dollar bonuses and it's a lot more money than most average Americans received from any policy enacted in eight years of the Obama administration.

It makes one wonder how much those who opposed tax reform really understand about businesses and how much they really care about the average worker.

For a full listing of what some American companies have done for their employees in the wake of the passage of tax reform, not including what might be done by other companies in the weeks and months ahead, go to the link.