Above Photo: Evan Vucci / AP
Six months after Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 into law, “the days of most people getting a pay raise are over.” That is one finding of a disturbing new report from Axios, which also notes that major corporations are planning on cutting their respective payrolls, despite having secured trillions in tax savings from Republican legislators in Congress.
During a conference Thursday at the Dallas Fed, several of the country’s leading CEOs were asked if they had any plans to use their collective tax windfall to increase wages. Their answers, according to Axios’ Steve LeVine, were “candid and bracing.”
“It’s just not going to happen,” Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola Beverages Florida Troy Taylor told the discussion’s moderator. “Absolutely not in my business.”
Taylor and several others suggested that if workers wanted to increase their salaries, or even save their jobs, they would have to pursue more “technically-skilled” employment. As AT&T Chief Financial Officer John Stephens remarked, “I don’t need that many guys to install coaxial cables.”
Meanwhile, the chasm separating the incomes of corporate executives from rank-and-file workers has never yawned wider. Thanks to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which requires major corporations to compare the earnings of CEOs with median-compensation employees, we now know it would take workers at companies like Walmart and Time Warner centuries, even millenniums, to match what top executives make in a single year.
Last week, The New York Times highlighted six outrageous CEO pay packages that help put this gap in perspective. They include those of disgraced casino mogul Stephen Wynn, whose $34,522,695 income totaled 909 times that of an average Wynn Resorts staffer; First Data CEO Frank Bisignano, whose compensation was $102,210,396, or 2,028 times that of his average employee; and former Mattel CEO Margaret Georgiadis, whose $31,275,289 compensation registered at 4,987 times that of her average worker.
If the Trump tax cuts have widened this gulf, the American people can’t say they weren’t warned. Prior to its passage, Sen. Bernie Sanders derided the legislation as a thinly veiled gift to billionaire donors, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it “the biggest tax giveaway to giant corporations in modern memory.”