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cheesecakegood • yesterday at 8:47 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I would go a little bit further and just say that American workers haven’t been the main beneficiaries of investment for at least a decade now. It “used to be” (some rose tinted glasses but still big kernel of truth) that if a company was making a lot of money or sitting on a big cash war chest, eventually it would make its way back to the employees for expansion, R&D, etc. It would be used for something! But ever since companies started to divert those flows to stock buybacks (and now, the equivalent which seems to be mutual stock purchases) less and less of those profits have been functionally reinvested - the reinvestment mostly happens on paper, and the already-wealthy owners of the stocks get wealthier without expanding the stockholder base as much.


Replies

jimbokun • yesterday at 10:45 PM

When was this time when corporations paid out more in compensation to workers than they absolutely had to?

Maybe for a short window between the establishment of strong labor unions and Reagan era deregulation.