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Comment by V__ | Hacker News Reader

> A single day without functioning freight rail would cost the U.S. economy an estimated $2 billion.

> the seven dominant North American railways had a combined net income of $27 billion, nearly twice their margin a decade ago. In the interim, the railways have collectively doled out $146 billion in dividends and stock buybacks while investing only $116 billion into their businesses.

7 sick days, which is laughable, but this is all they want. How the government can even think about taking the companies side here is totally outside my understanding.

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Stock buybacks were outlawed after the Great Depression and a widespread realization that buybacks are insider trading.

The cynic in me says people have forsaken their local and national governments and this is the fruit of their inattention. Democracy and electing representatives requires work from the citizens. Want politicians to vote for more paid leave for rail workers? Write your representatives and make it an issue you vote upon over a period of time. Also put aside the echo chambers and study reality. Facts are the lifeblood of this country so learn them and shun shameful liars and grifters.

And ditch the animosity. No more “owning the libs”, no more sitting back and saying your government is failing. Ie no more “America in decline”-ism aka “decline-ism”. No more silly platitudes that masquerade as progress but amount to letterhead activism. Do some real work for the better of your fellows for an extended period of time.

Edit-Treat others the exact, one correct way to treat each other. As ends unto themselves and never as means to ends. That would demand more than simply adding some pronouns to vocabulary and would include things like paid leave, health care, and livable wages. Insisting upon basic quality of life measures for all workers and citizens. It’d also look like respecting each other enough to, if pressed, agree to disagree when nothing else can be agreed.

Edit-It’d also look like always plunking down a 20% tip on your fast food orders and restaurant meals. Treating the UPS delivery person with dignity and gratitude. Ceasing the road rage. Etc.

Thank you for the well thought out comment. Current day US politics are absolutely absurd, it's a show to distract the public while capital owners continue to enrich themselves off the backs of everyone else. We need our politicians to actually step up and do something for the workers of the country who keep things running. Not more of the culture war bs. This goes for all political denominations

There is nothing wrong with stock buybacks, and the only people negatively affected by them are the investors who own the business.

DJ, you are very mistaken in that statement.

Investing contains risks not suitable for everyone, and if you can't understand those risks ahead of time, perhaps you shouldn't be investing.

If you do, there is a high likelihood that you'll eventually get really burned (lose money) and have only yourself to blame.

Stock buybacks primarily enrich executives over the shareholders because much of their compensation is derived from it.

Many companies, to avoid leveraged buyouts (hostile takovers) must carry a high debt to cash ratio.

What happens to a brittle system, when there is a sudden economic event, and you were already up to your gills in debt (by default), and you funded the buyback with more debt? How is that terribly different from what happened with the Penn Central bailout and bankruptcy?

> Stock buybacks were outlawed after the Great Depression and a widespread realization that buybacks are insider trading.

And of course it was Ronald Reagan who began the regulatory capture of the SEC by appointing a Wall Street executive to head it. So much of what’s wrong can be traced back to Ronnie.

The post-depression panic about share buybacks was uninformed and lacked evidentiary basis, as there were only very unique situations in which a company could actually boost its market value this way -- namely if it was fighting some kind of short squeeze and was also thinly traded relative to the number of shares purchased. I wonder whether you think shorting shares is also stock market manipulation? And is the selling of new shares -- something that was also liberalized by the SEC -- also manipulation? Or is it only the buying back that is manipulation?

The reason they were liberalized, despite all the sputtering about "Reagan", is that safe harbors were added that required the amount of issuance to not exceed a fraction of the average daily volume so that it couldn't be used to manipulate market caps. Merely the raising or lowering of the price per share is not manipulation if the market cap is unchanged: businesses are allowed to split and reverse-split shares as well -- or do you also view that as "manipulation"?

Watching some people obsess about share buybacks is truly funny, because you have the worst possible set of bad takes happening on this one issue. Of all the things to worry about -- e.g. Fed puts, the fact that banks have lower funding costs and yet can compete against retail investors, the fact that we have this artificial distinction between long term and short term gains creating big write offs, lawmakers getting rich via trading, etc. So many areas of reform are needed, yet there is this maniacal focus on share buybacks by people who don't really understand what is wrong with them but they just know it's fishy. It's truly the issue that has launched 1000 angry Mother Jones editorials by people who've never set foot on a trading floor -- when fewer things are more harmless in our shark-infested capital markets than share buybacks.

The government shouldn't be taking any side.

Why not? It is an essential industry with the potential to cause an enormous economic disruption. If the government doesn't want to nationalize it, then it should get involved and prevent stubborn executives from creating an unnecessary crisis.

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