But if you get an unexpected windfall, you go to Vegas, or you take the W&K to Disneyland.

But big businesses are different. They are not shops run by an ambitious and courageous expert who made it big (Like Ford Motor Company a century ago) and are building up a firm they can pass on to their children. Big businesses are machines for making profits, and they are run by professional managers who could just as easily be running an airline or a bank or a chain of supermarkets. These samurai are not super-competent aviators or bankers or grocers, they are bean-counters; hired guns, sellswords. They have no love or respect for that business and if they run it into the ground they’ll just cash in their golden parachutes and go work for another, totally unrelated industry and do the same thing all over again.

As for the owners, they have no personal stake, loyalty or love for the industries they own stock in (they may not even know who they are or what they make) or their long-term viability. They’ll move their cash around anywhere the short-term returns are highest. There are no “owners” any more. There are only banks and stock markets and investment firms. We’re not even a nation of shoipkeepers any more, we’re a nation of middlemen. Business is no longer the kid selling lemonade at the street corner stand, or the Architectural firm with 30 employees. The real model for American (indeed, World!) business today is not the Jeffersonian family farm, its an 18th century New World tobacco or sugar plantation. And plantations work best with slave labor.

As for the tax cut, it probably won’t mean all that much to the average worker or small businessman. They might even do a little better than they are under the current setup, at least for a while. But the real winners will be the big corporations and their managers and their stockholders. They will make out like bandits. ONE and a HALF TRILLION DOLLARS worth.

But that’s been the plan all along, hasn’t it?

So I don’t think this is really true. At least not in my experience at the small business level. My experience is limited to a single 30 person Architecture firm, but at least in this one case, my company shares profits out to all employees at year’s end. I’ve been with the firm 19 years, with the last year in a management position. I started as a lowly drafter in ’99, so I have had a view from the bottom and up through the ranks to becoming a licensed architect, then as an associate.

While the amounts each individual receives is kept secret, the last few years they have informed everyone what the overall take was as an effort to increase productivity. Some basic math tells me that there isn’t hoarding by the owners when it comes to bonuses.

Maybe mine is an isolated case, and it may very well be. There is a reason I haven’t ever changed firms and its because I have always felt taken care of. Then again, architects are typically terrible businessmen, so perhaps it really is atypical, and “real” businessmen are raking it in hand over fist.

I am curious what sort of change the tax “reform” will have on us. Currently we are an S corp so taxes pass through to the individuals receiving the profits. It’s probably why there is so much profit sharing. Profit sharing is also tax sharing in an S corp. With a lower corp tax rate it might justify a classification change, in which case who knows what might happen to our current profit sharing model. I am no expert on taxation though, so take my comments with a grain of salt.

I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, and think history will probably judge this tax cut to be another corporate giveaway without a tangible benefit to the economy or working stiff.