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For the calendar year 2018, federal corporate tax revenues were about $91.4 billion lower than during calendar year 2017, a decline of about 32%. The federal corp. tax cuts that took effect in 2018 lowered the tax rate from 35% to 21% and are the primary reason that federal revenues were 0.4% lower in calendar year 2018 compared to 2017 (in a strong economy). All banks are required to file detailed financial reports to regulators on a quarterly basis. Examining that data provides an estimate of how banks were affected by the recent federal tax cuts. Comparing the average effective tax rate of banks between 2013 and 2016 (in 2017 banks paid an an anomalously high rate) to the rate in 2018 and applying the difference to the pretax income of banks provides an estimate of the savings banks received from the corp. tax cut. The table below shows that collectively, banks accounted for $31.7 billion or about 1/3^rd of the total corp. tax cut savings, with the 9 largest banks saving almost $15 billion or 16% of the total corporate tax savings in 2018 – an average $1.64 billion per bank.  I expect banks, and big banks in particular to have an issue with this estimate so I encourage them to point out errors in my simple methodology.

This entry was posted on April 2, 2019 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Banks, corporations, Federal Deficit, tax cuts, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: banks, tax cuts, tax rate