You know who got a hefty pay increase between 2017 and 2018? The banks!
According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s 2018 Q4 report, more than 5,400 federally insured banks made $236.7 billion in profits last year, and saw a $72.4 billion increase in profits from 2017. Per the Hill, $28.8 billion of those profits resulted from the GOP’s tax cuts, which brought down the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
Banks also saw an $8.1 billion increase in Q4 of 2018 compared to 2017, with a total of $59 billion in profits in that quarter. Without the tax cut, banks would have only made $207.9 billion in 2018, the Hill reports. That’s basically nothing!
Unprofitable banks also fell from 16.6 percent in 2017 to 6.5 percent the following year, and for the first time since 2006, not a single bank failed.
So yes, American workers by and large got the extremely short end of the tax cut stick. But isn’t it great to know that someone—er, something—is thriving?