Also:
They’re not even pretending they’ll help the average worker.
Nightly News aired the clip of that forum tonight, @rosered55. VIdeo proof that the story isn’t fake news. I think they followed up with a stat that 35% of businesses said they they would expand jobs and/or raise wages. I believe they said most of the remaining 55% were planning stock buybacks. I teach the mechanics of repurchasing treasury shares to my classes each semester, but I’ll spare CC the lecture and just summarize that there will be no benefit to the middle class from that.
Interesting, @notrichenough. We are sitting on a pile of cash with several options… we might keep this mortgage after all.
This is topical: businesses can no longer deduct settlements or attorney fees for sexual harassment/abuse if the agreement is subject to non-disclosure.
It adds an excise tax for non-profits whose top execs make more than $1mil/year.
There’s 15 pages on changes to stock options, but I can’t quite puzzle out the meat of it. So much mumbo jumbo…
I can’t read any more tonight, and I’m only a 60% done (and I’ve mostly been skimming it).
@notrichenough, but you’re ready to vote on it, no?
My employer will not use any tax savings for employee raises or to hire more employees. Their focus is overall reduction in labor rates and headcount reductions. In their convoluted reasoning, the same work can be done by lower paid, lower skilled employees. The one situation I know of the opposite happened, but they are still trying.
Excess cash has gone towards stock buybacks and dividend increases for several years.
They are not alone in this way of thinking.
@Dave_N Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
In fairness, a lot of what is in here has been discussed for a while. So much of it should not come as a surprise.
“There’s 15 pages on changes to stock options, but I can’t quite puzzle out the meat of it. So much mumbo jumbo…”
Great. I will try to slog through that tomorrow. Too tired after drafting my own 200 page document… I anticipate there is nothing good in there for startups. We thought they would leave those alone. Ha! First, universities. Now startups?
Bless you, nre. I have graduate degrees in math and physics and I always seem to calculate our tax owed wrong. I go into a coma just reading the instructions. I’m impressed with anyone even willing to try to read a law not even passed yet.
There will be some minor benefit to the middle class from that, to the extent that they have capital investments or interest in them:
- *The Millionaire Next Door* people presumably have capital investments that they put their savings in.
- People with wobbly underfunded defined-benefit pension plans may see the increased capital investment returns stabilizing those pension plans.
Of course, that is a spillover or side effect of the intended effect of giving most of the gains to the super-wealthy, who own disproportionately huge amounts of capital investments, and is far less beneficial to the middle class than anything that leads to increased hiring or higher wages and salaries for the labor that most of the middle class sells into the economy. And such benefits to the middle class may not necessarily compensate for future tax increases.
@BunsenBurner the option stuff starts at page 268.
Thanks!!! 
Don’t have to slog through to find it. 
One more thing that has made me very angry!
“Let dispel ourselves of this notion that Marco Rubio doesn’t know exactly what he is doing offering this cynical amendment to extend the child tax credit that would have raised the corporate rate 0.94%.”
He could have written this into the bill and we all know it!
And mostly at LTCG rates, too.
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to buy their own stock, except to fund employee stock programs. Kick the money out as ordinary dividends taxed as regular income.
I just know they added an amendment to it, to specifically benefit the busdriver family, and us alone. I’m sure it’s got to be there! 
@busdriver11, wow welcome to the donor class. What’d get, 1B return on your 50M donation? Congrats!
Qualified dividends are currently taxed at favored rates (0%/15%/20%). It is rather unlikely that they will be taxed at labor income tax rates. (Of course, taxing all income at the same rates would eliminate many of the shenanigans and special rules about how to classify income.)
Companies buy back the stock at least in part because they do not want to have to keep paying dividends on it. It is conceptually the reverse of a secondary offering. Buying back all of the stock to go private is conceptually the reverse of an initial public offering.
For military research, specifically, most of the money goes to a few universities. There’s a few reasons for this. Most universities aren’t equipped to handle classified research. Even if the research isn’t classified, ITAR restrictions and/or no foreign national requirements in the contract, can both limit who can be hired onto the grant(faculty and students) and can be a pain that universities don’t want to deal with. As to who conducts fundamental research, FFRDCs and the services do. The services have their own research labs. Lincoln Labs, a FFRDC, may be part of MIT, but effectively functions as a separate entity from the rest of the school.
We’re surely getting deductions for our 2 doggos! They are super special and as much work as toddlers (just the dog hair alone), and we certainly consider them part of our family. Surely they will write in a clause for all our dogs and cats!
DARPA used to throw a lot of money around for basic research (e.g. in computer science) that was not specifically military, classified or otherwise restricted, but which could potentially benefit military applications. Perhaps it is doing much less of this kind of funding now?