Remember the massive $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich President Trump and the then-GOP majority Congress pushed just over a year ago, claiming it would prompt employers to grow hiring, wages and capital investment?
It didn't. The tax-cut package Trump signed on Dec. 22, 2017, "appeared to have no major impact on businesses' capital investment or hiring plans," according to Reuters report on a survey released a year after the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in more than three decades.
The National Association of Business Economics' quarterly business conditions poll, published on Monday, found that 84 percent of respondents said they had not changed their business plans. That compares to 81 percent in the previous quarterly survey published in October.
Trump and his advisers had predicted that reducing the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent would boost business spending and job growth.
In fact, the opposite appears to have occurred. The survey's measure of capital spending fell in January to its lowest level since July 2017, and the survey suggests a further slowdown, with respondents reporting weakened expectations for capital spending for the next three months.
This comes at a time when we're on a 15-day pause after a 35-day government shutdown that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cost our economy $3 billion. (An estimate made Friday from S&P Global Ratings put the shutdown's cost at twice that - close to $6 billion.)
It also comes as Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a potential 2020 presidential contender, announced a plan to raise taxes on the country's wealthiest residents. She proposes a wealth tax that would apply to "ultra-millionaires," or those with more than $50 million in assets. The tax would be equal to 2 percent, but would rise to 3 percent for those who have assets valued at more than $1 billion.
Already, Fox News pundits have begun whining - misleadingly - saying the idea could "devastate" middle-class prosperity.
"I don't think the Democrats care," former Bain Capital managing director Ed Conard told Fox on Friday. "I think they care about taking that money to help the poor. I don't think they care about generating middle-class prosperity."
Does $50 million in assets sound middle class? Hardly.
And when 84 percent of corporate respondents in a major business survey say that their big tax cut last year didn't spur them to expand their business plans and spread the wealth, should we buy the GOP's tired tactic of telling us corporate welfare will make our jobs more plentiful and our wages higher? Hardly.