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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

Maybe instead of doing share buybacks to transfer .9% of the value to shareholders, major conglomerates could just give money to poor people to spend on their products.

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Or rich software engineers who consider themselves to be socially progressive, should give their money to the poor, instead of into 401Ks. Because, who knows if the company managing the the 401K is backing share buyback programs of the Apples of the world

I can help 2, maybe 3 people, and retire without any assets. Not saying buybacks are the root of all evil, but if companies could give a crap about their employees or communities they might increase wages.

Broadly, 20% of GDP already goes on welfare [1]. Government tax take is about 40% of GDP [2], so about half the taxes that corporations "pay" [3] already go to poor people to spend on their products in some sense (if we neglect benefits-in-kind).

I'm sure companies would love to be able to give poor people vouchers rather than paying their taxes but I don't think that's a great idea. This study is primarily saying that cash is great because it's fungible.

[1]: https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm

[2]: https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-revenue.htm

[3]: scare quotes are because all taxes ultimately fall on human beings, whether that be through shareholdings (pensions), suppressed wages or higher prices.

That 20% includes a lot of social spending that isn't necessarily spent on the poor like social security and medicare.

Yeah. In the UK about a third goes on actually poor people. I hope that doesn't invalidate my point: we already have a mechanism where corporations give money to poor people.

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