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A Tax on
Buybacks
Stock
buybacks are back
on the rise—continuing a trend supercharged by the 2017
Trump tax cuts.
Now, amid ongoing budget
reconciliation negotiations, Senate Democrats are proposing a 2
percent tax on corporations that engage in the practice.
As Roosevelt Fellow Lenore
Palladino has argued, buybacks manipulate stock prices, enrich
corporate executives and shareholders at the expense of workers and
taxpayers, and stifle innovation.
“Stock buybacks are one of the
drivers of our imbalanced economy, in which corporate profits and
shareholder payments skyrocket while wages for typical workers stay
flat,” she told the New York Times this
week.
“That just means that the wealth
created by stock buybacks is going to a very small slice of the
American public.”
Curbing buybacks, Palladino and
William Lazonick explain in a Roosevelt paper, would discourage
practices that hurt workers and encourage higher wages and investment
in innovation.
Learn
how in “Regulating Stock Buybacks: The $6.3 Trillion
Question."
In the Weeds of
Macroeconomic Policy
On this week’s episode of Vox’s
The Weeds podcast, host Matthew Yglesias and
Roosevelt’s Mike Konczal discuss the Federal Reserve, interest rates and
unemployment, and the economic policy response to the
pandemic.
“The fact that we actually took an
opportunity to do fiscal stimulus well—we spent probably $5–6 trillion
. . . we reduced poverty, we took real efforts to invest . . . is a
huge deal,” Konczal says.
Learn
more about how policymakers can continue to shepherd the recovery in
“Reimagining Full Employment: 28 Million More Jobs and a More Equal
Economy.”
EconCon
2021
On October 6 and 7, join experts,
organizers, and advocates from Roosevelt and progressive organizations
across the country at EconCon
2021, a virtual
conference focused on building an economy that works for
everyone.
Explore
this year’s EconCon sessions (including “Owning
the Boom: The Transformative Effects of a Full-Employment Economy”
with Roosevelt’s Mike Konczal) and register
now.
What We’re
Reading
“Neoliberalism
Has Really Ruptured”: Adam Tooze on the Legacy of 2020 [feat.
Roosevelt’s Mike Konczal] - Vox
Inequality
Has Cost the US Nearly $23 Trillion since 1990 [feat. Roosevelt’s
William “Sandy” Darity Jr.] - Bloomberg
COVID-19
and Human Freedom [by Roosevelt’s Joseph
Stiglitz] -
Project Syndicate
Could
COVID-19 Finally End Hunger in America? - Politico
Skilled
Workers Are Scarce, Posing a Challenge for Biden’s Infrastructure
Plan -
New York
Times
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