Why Stock Buybacks are Bad

 Robert Reich explains:

Companies don’t get better because of buybacks. Shareholders only get richer. While railroads spent more on stock buybacks than rail safety, Warren Buffett’s wealth increased by $42 billion.

Researchers at Deloitte point out that buybacks and dividends have soared as a share of GDP, while corporate investments in equipment and infrastructure have stagnated. Many of the social costs of this failure to invest have been shifted to the public-at-large, as we saw in East Palestine.

Stock buybacks don’t create more jobs. They don’t increase wages. They don’t grow the economy.

Before 1982, it was illegal for corporations to purchase their own stock to artificially prop up share prices. Then Ronald Reagan’s SEC adopted a rule protecting corporations from being charged for this kind of stock manipulation.

Jump ahead to 2017 and the Trump-GOP tax cuts added fuel to the fire. Since then, stock buybacks have more than doubled, reaching a record high $1.2 trillion in 2022 alone.

That’s $1.2 trillion that did not go into improving quality of life for American workers or building the American economy. It just went straight into the pockets of already-wealthy shareholders and CEOs.

Once again, Wall Street gains at the expense of working families.

The Power of the Climate Policies in the Inflation Reduction Act

  Paul Krugman

huge progress in renewable energy and related technologies, notably batteries, means that it now looks almost easy to achieve a low-emission economy. We can now easily envision a society in which people drive electric vehicles and cook on induction ranges, using power generated by solar panels and wind turbines, and experience no sense of sacrifice.

The role of policy then becomes to accelerate this transition — to push us over the tipping point into a sustainable economy. And this need not involve huge amounts of public money, just enough to act as a sort of catalyst for change.

A second, somewhat related reason to think that Biden’s climate policy is a big deal is that it doesn’t actually mandate $400 billion in spending. What it does, mainly, is set conditions under which consumers and businesses can receive tax credits for adopting green technology. That $400 billion is based on an estimate of how many people will actually take advantage of these tax credits — and given the spectacular rate of technological progress, that estimate may well turn out to be low.

...

it depends not just on a rapid expansion of solar and wind power, but also on linking these new energy sources to the electrical grid. But the U.S. power grid doesn’t have enough capacity, and it is in general a mess.

Part of the reason is that there isn’t really a U.S. grid: Investment in electricity transmission is, as a Reuters report put it, “controlled by a Byzantine web of local, state and regional regulators who have strong political incentives to hold down spending.” And this regulatory system wasn’t designed to handle the sudden influx of new energy sources; as a result, simply getting permission to connect to the grid can take years.

we may need a third, bureaucratic miracle to fix the electricity grid and make this whole thing work.