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stock buybacks
Don't Just Tax the Uber Rich, Reform the Corporate Structure That Creates Them
The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits
Mar 13, 2026
Targeting billionaires with California’s proposed wealth tax is an eye-catching idea, but perhaps the real problem is how some of these people become billionaires in the first place.
California has long eyed taxing the ultra rich. In 2024, Assembly Bill 259, backed by progressive Democrats and unions like the California Federation of Teachers, sought annual wealth taxes but was blocked by centrist Democrats, business groups, and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Now, advocates are going for a one-time 5% levy on roughly 200 billionaires, covering everything they own—stocks, businesses, art, private islands, personal spacecraft, even intellectual property—basically the whole enchilada if they were state residents on January 1, 2026. Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West estimates the tax could raise $100 billion for health and social services.
Backers call it a fair share. Critics cite economic, legal, and retroactive risks.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
To many, the logic seems straightforward: Billionaires have absurd, even toxic amounts of money. The richest 1% now own more than the bottom 90% combined. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman note that middle- and working-class Americans often pay higher effective tax rates than the super rich, whose California fortunes grew over $2 trillion in just a few years.
Why not tax them?
But Here’s the Twist
Economist William Lazonick, a long-time critic of the way many US corporations are run, argues that targeting individual fortunes treats the symptom, not the disease. The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while shortchanging other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits—and too often creating little of real value to society.
Most billionaires don’t “earn” their fortunes through work. They build wealth by owning stock in corporations. Executives and boards pump up dividends and stock prices, often using stock buybacks, which rocket their own pay into the stratosphere. Managers and professionals with stock options or stock awards can cash in too—but only if they keep their jobs. Everyone else—most workers and the wider public that depends on taxing corporate profits to fund schools, roads, and healthcare—gets left behind.
This shareholder-first model (famously called “the dumbest idea in the world” by former GE CEO Jack Welch), encourages executives and investors to treat companies like giant ATMs, pulling money out rather than reinvesting profits to create lasting value.
Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg. Nearly all of his mind-boggling fortune—the kind that just bought him a record-smashing $170 million mansion in Miami-Dade County near Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and is funding a bombproof bunker-complex in Kauai that disturbs local wildlife—comes straight from owning stock in Meta Platforms. Meta has spent nearly $200 billion on stock buybacks in the past five years. Those buybacks have fattened the wallets of shareholders, including Meta’s top executives and professionals, while leaving the rest of society out of the gains (Meta is famous for its tax-dodging schemes). With Meta, there aren’t any hedge-fund activists forcing Zuckerberg to do buybacks—they’re happening by choice.
Lazonick points out that “with all the profits that they have, they could be creating stable, high-paid jobs for the workers whom they employ—and thereby put in place powerful social conditions for collective and cumulative learning.” He adds, “Instead they are using stock-based pay, which is always volatile and which results in unstable and inequitable employment, to compete for talent.”
Now, even some of Meta’s highest-paid employees are feeling the squeeze. With stock-based pay being cut back and the AI revolution changing work, some of the people who once seemed untouchable are discovering that their jobs aren’t as secure as they thought.
Then there’s Tim Cook. Much of his wealth comes from stock-based compensation tied to the stock-market performance of Apple Inc. Under his leadership as CEO, Apple’s so-called “Capital Return Program” has spent hundreds of billions on stock buybacks—north of half a trillion dollars when counting programs from the early 2010s on—which have helped push up the share price and richly rewarded executives and shareholders. Lazonick has criticized this trend, arguing that Apple’s huge buybacks reward shareholders who have never provided finance to the company, instead of investing in value-creating workers who are the source of innovation. This is the activity that has Cook extremely rich—though he still buys his underwear on sale at Nordstrom, so it’s not entirely clear why he needs all this money.
His workers could sure use a bigger cut. It is a fact that many of the workers who build, sell, or support Apple products have faced stingy pay and labor issues: Some retail employees have pushed for higher minimum wages and better benefits as recently as 2022, and labor-rights groups have documented low wages and complaints about conditions among Apple’s supply-chain workers.
A one-time California wealth tax might dent the personal fortunes of the Zuckerbergs and Cooks, but it does nothing to slow the corporate machinery that grinds on to produce still more of them.
Historically, reformers recognized this issue. For example, Thorstein Veblen critiqued the ways elites could extract wealth while contributing less to society than might be expected. And early 20th-century progressives championed higher corporate taxes and antitrust laws because they understood that inequality was more structural than individual.
This is what 19th-century critic John Ruskin had in mind when he coined the term “illth.” For Ruskin, true wealth, or “weal,” promotes everyone’s health and prosperity. Illth, by contrast, amasses when money is extracted or hoarded without focusing on social value. Stock buybacks and ownership stakes that line the pockets of executives at the expense of employees, communities, or innovation are a modern form of illth.
We don’t want illth.
Taylor Swift Isn’t the Problem
Now let’s bring in someone we can all relate to—Taylor Swift. Her fortune comes from her creativity, work, and audience engagement. She writes songs, records albums, tours, sells merchandise, and negotiates brand deals. Yes, corporate structures like Ticketmaster’s oligopoly complicate matters—but Swift herself isn’t the CEO of a company extracting illth through financial engineering. Taxing her personal wealth dramatizes the issue without addressing its source.
Policies aimed at corporate engines of inequality, rather than individual fortunes, could reshape the system itself. Lazonick and others have recommended a variety of approaches:
- Ban stock buybacks and suppress predatory value extraction. This curbs wealth concentration at the top.
- Encourage employee ownership or provide employee representation on corporate boards. Gains should benefit a broader group of stakeholders—not just shareholders.
- Reimagine corporate governance. Move towards stakeholder models balancing shareholder yields with social and environmental responsibility.
And last, but not least:
- Strengthen progressive corporate taxation. Close loopholes that allow extreme wealth accumulation.
As Lazonick sees it, whether it happens at the federal, state, or local level, government policy should focus on curbing predatory value extraction and promoting what he calls “progressive value creation”—which means passing laws to stop corporations from being looted, a key source of the exploding wealth of the mega rich. “From this position of regulatory power,” he advises, “we should then decide how the top 0.1% should be taxed.”
The real work, from this perspective, is reforming the structures that concentrate wealth. If we want an economy that fosters health, innovation, and opportunity instead of illth, chasing Taylor Swift won’t cut it. We need to start regulating the corporate engines behind her peers’ billions
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Do the Democrats Have the Guts to Outflank Trump on Defense Industry Looting?
The Democrats could push Trump—or go around him to make better inroads with working people—but will they dare to take that leap? One would hope so, but don’t hold your breath.
Jan 14, 2026
Trump has decided that the government should not give money to defense contractors who then reroute our tax dollars via stock buybacks to stockholders and executives.
A stock buyback, for those unfamiliar, is when a corporation repurchases its own shares, thus boosting the share’s price, a legalized form of stock manipulation. CEOs, who are paid mostly in stock incentives, and large investors directly benefit from stock buybacks, and unlike with dividends, don’t have to pay taxes until they sell their shares.
In the weapons industry, this isn’t news. Studies show that defense contractors spent three times more on dividends and stock buybacks than on capital investments needed to fulfill their contracts over the last decade. In Europe, it was the other way around with defense companies spending twice as much on capital investments compared to dividends. (They don’t do stock buybacks.)
The New York Times cited a Department of Defense study during the Biden administration that “found that top US defense contractors spent more on returning cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks between 2010 and 2019 compared to the previous decades, while spending on research and new or upgraded factories had declined.”
You’ve got to wonder why the Biden administration didn’t try to stop this scam. Maybe it feared looking anti-military. Or maybe it thought such an action would be too upsetting to their Wall Street donors who feast on stock buybacks?
Now we have Trump doing what the Democrats should have done long ago, announcing he will stop buybacks and cap executive salaries at profligate defense contractors:
- His Executive Order directs the Secretary of War to take steps to ensure that future contracts prohibit stock buybacks and corporate distributions during periods of underperformance, non-compliance, insufficient prioritization or investment, or insufficient production speed.
- The Secretary shall further take steps to ensure that future contracts permit the Secretary to, upon determining that a contractor is experiencing such issues, cap executive base salaries at current levels (with inflation adjustments permitted) while scrutinizing executive incentives to ensure they are directly, fairly, and tightly tied to prioritizing the needs of the warfighter.
How about Preventing Mass Layoffs?
If the Democrats wanted to show more concern for working people they would jump all over this executive order and push legislation to expand it to include a prohibition of compulsory layoffs at all defense contractors. If a contractor wants to change staffing levels, they should offer voluntary financial buyout packages. No one should be forced to leave.
This is an easy case to make. Why should taxpayers give money to corporations that then lay off taxpayers so that they can shovel more and more of our tax dollars to the wealthy? If the problem is that these defense contractors fail to deliver products on time they need more workers, not fewer.
Instead of wallowing in the Epstein files, the Democrats should declare again and again that mass layoffs are the weapon of choice to enrich executives and Wall Street. Fight for the damn jobs!
In April, the Labor Institute, in cooperation with the Center for Working Class Politics, produced a YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In the survey, we asked voters to evaluate a state ballot initiative we invented that read:
“Corporations with more than 500 employees that receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts are prohibited from conducting involuntary layoffs of American workers. All layoffs during the life of a taxpayer-funded contract must be voluntary, based on employer financial incentives. No one shall be forced to leave.”
Overall, 42 percent supported the proposal, while 26 percent opposed it and 32 percent were not sure. The no-layoff proposal was brand new, unheard of by anyone before the survey was administered, yet it tied for fifth in popularity among 25 economic proposals. Furthermore, we reported that:
“Respondents from key demographic groups that Democrats have struggled to reach in recent electoral cycles showed robust support for the policy, which was tied for fifth among respondents without a four-year college degree and those whose family income was less than $50,000 per year, and tied for sixth among respondents who reported a declining standard of living and those who live in rural areas and small towns.”
This no-layoffs policy would be a big winner for the Democrats leading up to the mid-terms. But it would not be a winner for the financial backers of the party who cherish their stock buybacks.
So here we are again. Trump outflanking the Democrats on a populist economic proposal, like cancelling NAFTA, one that the Democrats failed to address while in power. In this case, the Democrats could push Trump even further by tying job stability to federal defense contracts, something that working people would greatly value but would be upsetting to Wall Street.
The Democrats could push Trump, but will they dare to take that leap? One would hope so, but don’t hold your breath.
The failure to rigorously defend working people over the last forty years against needless mass layoffs may be why so many voters right now are willing to consider a new political party, independent of the two billionaire parties.
Much more on that to come.
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With GOP 'Looking at' Tyson's Alleged Market Manipulation, Nebraska Candidate Osborn Says 'Enforce the Law'
"Candidate for Senate Dan Osborn is already doing more for the people affected by the Tyson closure than the current Nebraska senators," said a worker rights advocate.
Dec 12, 2025
Instead of "another investigation" into possible wrongdoing by meatpacking giant Tyson, independent US Senate candidate Dan Osborn is demanding that elected officials in Nebraska simply "pick up the damn phone" and demand action from the Trump administration following the company's closure of one of the nation's largest meat processing plants in what one antitrust expert said was a clear-cut case of market manipulation.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), whom Osborn is challenging in the 2026 election, said Thursday that his team is "taking a look at any allegation of wrongdoing" by Tyson, weeks after the company announced its massive plant in Lexington, Nebraska is set to close in January—putting more than 3,000 people in a town of 11,000 out of work.
The closure comes months after Tyson boosted its stock buybacks and following an announcement that its adjusted operating income had increased by 26% compared to 2024. Tyson controls about 80% of the US beef market along with three other companies, and the Department of Justice is investigating whether the four corporations are colluding to keep beef prices high.
Despite near-record high prices in the industry, Tyson said last week it was closing the Lexington plant and scaling back operations at its facility in Amarillo, Texas to "right-size its beef business and position it for long-term success."
Basel Musharbash, an antitrust lawyer at Antimonopoly Counsel in Paris, Texas, attended a press conference with Osborn across the street from the Lexington plant this week and said that the "legal analysis here is pretty straightforward" regarding whether Tyson has engaged in market manipulation.
“The Lexington plant accounts for around 5% of the nation’s cattle," said Musharbash. "By shutting down a plant that slaughters such a large portion of the cattle in this region and the country, Tyson will single-handedly reshape the nation’s cattle markets from boom to bust.”
Ranchers will be forced "to accept lower prices, and Tyson will be able to make higher profits," he said.
Osborn and Musharbash say Tyson has broken the 2021 Packers and Stockyards Act, which prohibits meatpackers from engaging "in any course of business or [doing] any act for the purpose or with the effect of manipulating or controlling prices."
Addressing Ricketts on social media, Osborn said Tyson workers "don’t need another useless congressional report that leads to nothing. We need ACTION!"
"Tyson workers and Nebraska ranchers need you to demand that [US Agriculture] Secretary Brooke Rollins immediately initiate an action to hold Tyson accountable for any market manipulation," he said.
The USDA told the Nebraska Examiner this week that it is monitoring "the closure of the plant to ensure compliance with the Packers and Stockyards Act," but Musharbash said Rollins can and should "compel Tyson to either keep the plant open or sell the plant to an upstart rival who will introduce honest competition into this cartelized industry."
"There is nothing left for Ricketts to 'look into,' and Nebraskans certainly don’t need some intern on Ricketts’ staff to write a research paper about this issue for the next six months while Tyson hollows out the Lexington community for its selfish gain," added Musharbash. "Nebraska—and this whole country—deserves better leaders than this."
Osborn pointed out Thursday that Ricketts has taken more than $70,000 in campaign donations from Tyson.
“The people of Lexington need their elected officials to fight now more than ever,” Osborn said at the press conference this week. “The law that’s been on the books for over 100 years should be enforced... So pick up the damn phone, call Brooke Rollins, and get the USDA to enforce the law.”
By visiting Lexington and speaking out against Tyson's gutting of thousands of jobs, former Federal Trade Commission member Alvaro Bedoya said that "candidate for Senate Dan Osborn is already doing more for the people affected by the Tyson closure than the current Nebraska senators."
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