The tax cut law was a wildly irresponsible way to further enrich the wealthiest Americans at the long-term expense of the middle class and poor.

Enjoy any tax savings you might be seeing now because you’ll be paying for them for years to come.

This week marked tax day, the filing deadline for federal income tax returns. President Donald Trump was in Florida for the occasion, holding an event in Hialeah where he claimed the economy was “starting to rock” because of the tax cuts he signed into law last year.

Those tax cuts were followed by Congress passing and Trump signing into law a massive spending bill that eliminated caps on the defense budget and other discretionary spending. The net result is rising budget deficits that will start hitting the $1 trillion mark in 2020, as the Congressional Budget Office recently announced.

The tax cut law was a wildly irresponsible way to further enrich the wealthiest Americans at the long-term expense of the middle class and poor. Instead of passing tax reform that closed loopholes or investing in infrastructure and other initiatives that provide wide benefits, the tax cuts only expanded an income gap between the richest 1 percent and everyone else.

Trump and other Republicans who pushed through the tax-cut measure, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, had claimed that it would lead to a $4,000 pay raise for the average American. Those claims amount to “trickle-down lies," as Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist who was the first outside investor in Amazon, put it in a recent column for USA Today.

As Hanauer explained, corporate executive and shareholders are seeing far more of the benefits than the average worker. The 500 top companies on the Standard & Poor’s index announced $158 billion in stock buybacks in the weeks after the tax cuts as compared to $1.5 billion in pay raises and $3.7 billion in one-time bonuses for their employees, according to the American-Industry Research Network.

Walmart, for example, announced it was awarding $1,000 in one-time bonuses to just 7 percent of its workforce while also planning $32 billion in stock buybacks and dividends over the next two years. At the same time, the company is closing 63 Sam’s Club stores and costing almost 11,000 workers their jobs.

While the tax-cut measure permanently slashed the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, it allows cuts for individual taxpayers to expire in 2025. Congress will then have to decide whether to gut safety-net programs to pay for those cuts, or add to a national debt that is expected to equal the size of our country’s gross domestic product around that time.

While spending supported by both Democrats and Republicans brought the budget to this point, the GOP tax measure makes matters much worse. Ryan, who recently announced his retirement from Congress, leaves a shameful legacy.

As for Trump, the measure will save the president and his family tens of millions of dollars. While some workers might be celebrating tax savings for the next few years, the country will be paying for much bigger benefits for Trump and other wealthy Americans for much longer.