> Are those because of the tax incentives?

Decreasing taxes on retained profits increases the incentive to cut any activity that is a short term loss rather than trying to turn it around.

Because business expenses are deductible from corporate “income” taxes, they are functionally retained profits taxes.

So, yes, the tax cuts incentivized the layoffs.

> Having been poor, then living on $750/month in US for many years, a $1000 bonus is not life changing but also not laughable.

But for rich and poor alike, a layoff is definitely life-changing....

> a $1000 bonus

That's up to a $1000 bonus. That's if you've been working there for 20 years.

For me the laughable part is that it's a small part of the benefits corporates will reap and some of the companies are also doing layoffs, as has been commented on by others.

You only get the full $1000 if you worked for Walmart full time for 20 years. It’s not like you would still get much if you were a typical Walmart employee.

> a $1000 bonus

For 20+ year employees.

At 10 years the bonus was, IIRC, $190. IMHO, "laughable".

A $1000 bonus, after taxes, is not a $1000 bonus. While an extra ~$700 might be a nice windfall for someone making minimum wage, it's hardly a life-changing event that will have an durable impact in their life.

What companies are doing is exactly what they were expected to do: make some "feel good" moves for a bit to validate the tax plan as a "resounding success" until the midterm elections, then do whatever they want. I've seen these incredible displays of "corporate goodwill" after tax breaks like this to know they are always temporary and self-serving (I grew up in a country where these "booms" happened like clockwork every 8 or so years.)

> $1000 bonus is not life changing but also not laughable.

> The companies certainly didn't have to give those and could have pocketed all of it.

Now imagine if the tax give-away would have gone completely to workers.

That would be life changing.

Relative to the tax savings those companies will enjoy and the fact it's a one time payment instead of salary increase? IIRC Comcast will end up paying about $150 million in bonuses which will only be a fraction of the first year tax savings for them.

If that's what this big hoopla ultimately amounts to then it will be highly disappointing. The fact that we are celebrating $1000 bonuses from corporations that have been enjoying record profits (for the most part) recently is disheartening. Something is better than nothing I guess.

It's very telling that most of the announcements of benefits to workers purportedly attributable to the tax cuts are in the form of one-time bonuses. The corporate tax cuts are ongoing; the bonuses to workers are one-time. These are nothing more than PR moves. Moreover, the headlines are misleading in some cases; for example, Walmart's touted "$1,000 bonus" was actually $200-$1,000 depending on years of service. Only workers with 20+ years of service are getting $1,000.

There have been a few announcements of actual wage increases that corporate PR departments have tried to attribute to the tax cuts, but in every one I've looked at, it was clear the wage increase was just the result of normal market forces and dressed up to pretend it was the result of tax cuts. For example, a few banks (including Wells Fargo) announced a minimum wage increase to $15/hour, but Bank of America announced that same change at the end of 2016, before any tax cuts.

You seem to have glossed over the poster's main point, which is that many the companies announcing those bonuses, in fact many of the ones you've listed are also laying off thousands of worker at the same time.

The criticism of these companies then is that they have just received massive financial windfalls via the GOP's tax cut programs and have portrayed normal corporate activities as signs of corporate largesse due to the tax-cut they've received. Should we tie the layoffs announced by these firms to their tax-cuts as well?

Walmart, for example, has struggled for years to attract employees due to the low wages they offer, wages so low that a good percentage of their labor pool is subsidized by taxpayers. When you combine that situation with the massive lay-offs and closures of Sam's Clubs the raising of wages seems to be less a generous overture driven by the tax-cut than perhaps a recognition that they must offer higher wages or continue to stagnate and fail.

I've also read that the bonus offered by AT&T is on the low-end of the bonuses offered every holiday to their employees. That's anecdotal though.

If we are defending $1,000 one-time bonuses, why not just pass a law requiring these companies to pay $1,000 to their workers?

This is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, but the point here is, what cost are we willing to pay as a society in exchange for the $1,000 one-time bonuses? This hypothetical law would be a terrible precedent for businesses, but would it be worse for the people receiving these bonuses than the actual tax plan?

And in order to answer whether it would or wouldn't, we need to look at the merits of the actual tax plan's substance, not the fact that it has (supposedly) caused people to get $1,000 bonuses.

Which coincides with state and local minimum wage increases; see http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/29/news/economy/2018-minimum-wa.... More increases are coming; several states are phasing in increases over multiple years. They're just getting ahead of the minimum wage increases and trying to get good PR out of it ("no, we didn't do this because we were forced to, we did it because we love our workers. cut our taxes more!").

That probably has more to do with low unemployment.

Imagine if personal income taxes were drastically lowered instead? then, walmart could keep the same pay, but ALL its customers (not just its employees) now have more take home pay to spend at walmart.

3 car payments on 2 rent payments in a lot of the country. Its like the folks poo-pooing the Youtube folks earning a couple hundred off their channels. That little bit helps quite a lot.

If you're talking about Walmart, they announced a one-time bonus of up to $1,000. Walmart estimates that it will cost about $400 million [1], and they employ 2.3 million people [2], so the average bonus is under $200. Meanwhile Walmart will save about $1.8 billion a year in taxes, every year, thanks to the tax cut.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/wal-mart-...

[2] https://www.google.be/search?q=number+of+employees+walmart

$1000 is better PR than any advertising they could have spent, but it's not even a crumb in terms of what the company is saving.

$1000 bonus is $500 after taxes. Which means, it is $40/month or $20/paycheck. It is laughable. Most employees will get $200 bonuses, which roughly will equate to $4/paycheck.

Of course not, but that doesn't mean you should take a well-timed and carefully worded press release at face value.

Let's see what actually lands in whose bank accounts before we raise the praise flags.