If the first quarter financial results are any indication, the Republican tax cuts are providing larger-than-expected benefits for American corporations, says Bloomberg’s Stephen Gandel. And if the initial trend holds, the corporate savings from the tax cuts would come to at least $1.64 trillion over 10 years – nearly $300 billion more than projected by the Joint Committee on Taxation last December.
According to Gandel’s analysis, which included 424 (or 85 percent) of the companies in the S&P 500, profits in the first quarter rose 23.5 percent compared to a year ago, with the tax cuts providing 43 percent of the increase. The companies saved nearly $30 billion in the first quarter – or $332 million a day. And that’s just for the subset of the S&P 500 companies Gandel was able to analyze; add in the thousands of other companies in the U.S., and “the total savings would most likely be much larger.”
Here’s a chart from Gandel’s analysis showing the companies that benefited the most from the tax cuts when compared to their income growth in the first quarter:
