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Category: Economics

3Jan
[tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Workers, innovation, and productivity all suffer when corporations spend their new U.S. tax breaks on stock buybacks.” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:25″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”The deceptively named Tax Cut and Jobs Act slashes the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent on the theory that companies will use the extra after-tax profits to make productive investments that will create jobs for Americans. “][tm_spacer size=”lg:63”]
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[tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Use psychological pricing methods.” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”Yet it is clear that instead of helping to rebuild the vanishing middle class, corporate executives will funnel the tax savings to already-rich shareholders through stock buybacks and cash dividends, increasing their take from the stock market. As a result, the nation’s rampantly unequal income distribution will only become worse.”][tm_spacer size=”xs:30;lg:35″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”When only a very few CEOs tentatively raised their hands, Cohn asked, “Why aren’t the other hands up?” Subsequent interviews made clear that, among the CEOs, it was already a foregone conclusion that the tax breaks would end up as buybacks and dividends.”]
[tm_spacer size=”xs:30;lg:52″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”For the Republican corporate tax cut to result in job creation, Congress must follow it up with legislation to rein in these distributions to shareholders. There is a straightforward and practical way to accomplish this objective: Congress should ban corporations from doing stock buybacks, more formally known as open-market stock repurchases.”][tm_spacer size=”xs:30;lg:68″]
[tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Demonstrate the differences” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”First, the stock-based compensation of senior executives incentivizes them to do distributions to shareholders. Annual mean remuneration of CEOs of the same 475 companies listed on the S&P 500 from 2007 through 2016 ranged from $9.4 million in 2009, when the stock market was in the dumps, to $20.1 million in 2015, when the stock market was booming.”][tm_spacer size=”sm:30;lg:68″][tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Offer a money-back guarantee” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”Second, for more than three decades, executives of major U.S. corporations have preached, conveniently masking their self-interest, that the paramount responsibility of their companies is to “create value” for shareholders. Most recently, from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies on listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54 percent of profits.”][tm_spacer size=”sm:30;lg:68″][tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Test your offer and price, and be creative.” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”In addition, these companies declared $2.9 trillion in dividends, which were 39 percent of profits. Indeed, top corporate executives are often willing to incur debt, lay off employees, cut wages, sell assets, and eat into cash reserves to “maximize shareholder value.””]
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20Dec
[tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Let’s start out with a smart device undershoot that seldom gets mentioned: e-books. E-book sales fell in 2015 and fell even more in 2017 as both paperback and hardback sales rose. Why? Readers can probably chime in, but print is still easier to read and navigate. ” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:25″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”You recall what you read better in print than in e-book form. And personally, I despised that my reader determined the e-book format. I found that I remember what I read where visually, and having all of the social science books I read appear in the same format meant that if I read several books on related issues, I could not recall which one was where I had picked up a particular factoid.”][tm_spacer size=”lg:63″]
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[tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Use psychological pricing methods.” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”NC readers had probably assumed the NSA had back doors to smart phones; this sort of thing makes that idea a smidge more official (the fact that the surveillance types can presumably obtain access isn’t the same as being able to get at it in a legal-looking manner, like unlocking it with a search warrant).”][tm_spacer size=”xs:30;lg:35″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”That sort of thing gave us Robby Mook confidently dismissing the pleas of operatives on the ground in Michigan and Wisconsin that the Clinton campaign was in trouble and she needed to spend more time and money in those states. We know how that movie ended.”]
[tm_spacer size=”xs:30;lg:52″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”But it is another manifestation of the sort of top 10% preening that Thomas Frank called out in Listen, Liberal, the fetishization of new, data driven techniques even when they aren’t necessarily well validated.”][tm_spacer size=”xs:30;lg:68″]
[tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Demonstrate the differences” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”Similarly, the fetishization of big data has cooled a bit (but not enough for my taste) as more and more users recognize that they can easily turn out to be means for institutionalizing prejudice or simply bad decision rules thanks to less than stellar problem framing and choice of data sets. As Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction, pointed out, “Algorithms are just opinions expressed in math.””][tm_spacer size=”sm:30;lg:68″][tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Offer a money-back guarantee” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”Finally, and far from least important, using smart devices puts you at the mercy of providers who are very good at forcing obsolescence or overt price increases upon you”][tm_spacer size=”sm:30;lg:68″][tm_heading tag=”h5″ custom_google_font=”” font_weight=”600″ text=”Test your offer and price, and be creative.” line_height=”1.4″][tm_spacer size=”lg:23″][tm_heading tag=”div” custom_google_font=”” text=”To return to the main thread, yours truly is so resistant to the marketing push to get us all to surrender to being surveilled even more in the name of “smartness” that there are no doubt many smart thingies that have their fans and detractors. What dumb devices do you prefer and why?”]
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