Did Trump's Tax Break help the Middle Class?

So does anyone still believe that the huge tax cut that Trump got passed really did the middle class a favor?


Look at FedEx…in 2017, FedEx owed and paid more than $1.5 BILLION in federal taxes. However, the company, and more specifically Founder and CEO Frederick Smith lobbied for a huge tax break based on the ‘promise’ that if corporations paid less taxes, they would invest more in the US, i.e. build factories, employee more people, improve benefits, etc.


So what happened the next year? FedEx’s tax liability went from 34% in 2017 to less than 0% in 2018 – the Federal Government technically owed FedEx money all as the result of the new corporate federal fax code passed by Trump and the Republican party.


Did FedEx invest more in the US as the result of all this tax savings? Nope – they didn’t. In fact, a review of the largest corporations showed that there was “no statistically meaningful relationship between the size of the tax cut that companies and industries received and the investments they made. If anything, the companies that received the biggest tax cuts increased their capital investment by less, on average, than companies that got smaller cuts.” (Capital IQ, New York Times, 2019)


In fact, FedEx spent much of the $1.6 BILLION it saved in Income Tax liability “…to reward shareholders: FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.” (MSN.Com, Jim Tankersley, Peter Eavis and Ben Casselman, 2019)


Now there is some indication that FedEx in 2018 did make some moderate increases in investments, however, those increases where actually less than what was planned and in 2019 (the current year), they are reducing the investments by reducing staffing and cutting bonuses. So, what they giveth they are taking away – but they are on track not to pay any income taxes again this year…

So do you still believe the Trump tax break helped the middle class? If so, I have a small island about 50 miles East of Jacksonville, Florida for sale…real cheap - $1.6 BILLION!