Stop Demonizing Stock Buybacks
If progressives think they’ve found a good stick to beat corporate America with, they’re wrong.
President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month featured a hefty dose of good old-fashioned economic populism. Biden called out the rich for cheating on taxes, and big companies for not paying any taxes at all. He attacked Big Pharma for jacking up drug prices. And he took aim at one of progressives’ bêtes noires: stock buybacks.
Biden attacked companies for spending money on buybacks rather than investing in their operations, and called on Congress to quadruple the tax on such stock repurchases—a tax first put in place by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. And on February 14, Senate Democrats Sherrod Brown and Ron Wyden introduced a bill that would do exactly that.
The proposed tax would raise some revenue, and
