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**MAY 18, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

The Return of the Buyback-and Mississippi Rules

For all Americans eager for a return to economic normality, here's
some welcome news: Buybacks are back!

As The Wall Street Journal reported

yesterday, "after a year of hoarding cash, American corporations are
ready to reward investors again."

And how. Citing a survey from Goldman Sachs, the

**Journal**said that so far this year, American companies have bought
back a tidy $504 billion of their own shares, which is the highest level
of repurchases in at least the past 22 years. After watching their cash
pile up during the past year of underinvestment, "we're buying back
stock because our cup runneth over," said JPMorgan Chase's Jamie
Dimon.

Some might quibble that it would be nice if Dimon and his fellow CEOs
increased their companies' investments at a similar pace. Instead, the


**Journal**continues, "early signs from earnings season, however,
indicate that capital expenditures aren't at the top of executives'
minds," noting that in their quarterly earnings reports, they
mentioned buybacks and dividends three times more than they mentioned
diverting their cash to capital investments (much less the kind of
domestic capital investments that the Biden administration is
encouraging, and much much much less any pay increases for their
workers).

Still, who can question that large-scale investors-often working
without masks-were taking real risks in their frontline labor over the
past year? As the plague circled around them, they stood by their posts.
So good to see America's CEOs (whose pay is linked to the increases in
their companies' share value which buybacks induce) rewarding these
heroes of the plague year.

ALSO YESTERDAY, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on the
constitutionality of Mississippi's anti-choice law, which was designed
to blow up

**Roe v. Wade**. The law bans almost all abortions after the first 15
weeks of pregnancy.

Mississippi is famed, of course, for its rich pro-life history. Without
a sufficient number of pregnancies carried to full term, the state would
surely have lacked for slaves and might not have been able to preside
over so many lynchings of its citizens. (The critical mass required for
a respectable lynch mob might have been harder to assemble as well.) In
upholding the state's new law, the Court could start a trend of using
Mississippi as a model that other states could follow. It is, after all,
one of just six states (five of them in the Deep South) with no
minimum-wage law of its own, since try though it may, that's as close
as the state and its immediate neighbors could get to preserving their
pre-1865 economies. And in murdering Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner,
and James Chaney (volunteers in the Freedom Summer voter registration
campaign), the state prefigured today's efforts to whiten the
electorate.

We'll soon learn if the Court wants to submit the nation to
Mississippi rules.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Does the bipartisan collaboration on a tougher China policy portend more
areas of bipartisanship? More populist policies generally? BY ROBERT
KUTTNER

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