this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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He wasn't successful at anything.
He slashed the corporate income tax and due to an effective amnesty on repatriation many large MNCs brought stashed offshore cash and cut R&D to register massive earnings for his last 2 years.
Ironically, this started to dry up right around Q1 2020... Then COVID drowned out everything.
His response was to just pump $4T to employers with almost no documentation, thank god we didn't see a massive wave in inflation out of that.
Okay this post reeks of not understanding basic accounting. Bringing back cash doesn’t affect profits for firms. The earnings were already earned. Having money over seas and bringing it on shore does not increase your profits, it just frees it up for investment (or giving to shareholders).
Also cutting R&D does not change profits in the short term. Any amount of R&D doesn’t change profits in the short term (either less or more). R&D is treated as an asset and depreciates over time (which does affect profits) but that’s clearly not what you’re saying here.
The rest of your post I’m not arguing with but your understanding of accounting and how offshore money works is factually incorrect.
https://www.bea.gov/news/2019/direct-investment-country-and-industry-2018
Right and at no point are you saying that earnings/profits were impacted by the tax amnesty and money being brought back on shore.
Your link says that the most predictable thing happened- all that money sitting over seas was given back to its owners (shareholders).
Absolutely none of this affected profits for that year. Mind you, that money was not being used for R&D anyways - it was sitting in bank accounts or bonds waiting for a moment like this to come back and be handed out to shareholders.
That's literally what I'm saying.
Are you being semantic?
They realized the revenue as dividends, which is exactly what the link says.