The amount the company I work for did in stock buybacks last year, were that wealth instead taxed or returned to the people, would have been able to:
Build 10,000,000 sqft of high schools, or, around 88 $45,000,000 high schools.
Or
Could have provided ~6.3 million women with young children or infants with supplemental health and nutrition through the WIC program for 8.5 months
Or
80 $50 million mental health facilities
Or
According to Dept of HUD, would have been 20% of the total needed to eradicate homelessness entirely from the country
Or
Fed 363,636 families of 4, for a total of 1.45 million people, for an entire year.
Or
Put solar panels on 250,000 homes.
My company did an entire BILLION less in buybacks. Adding up the top 5 companies I could find data for, we get the following: ~$56billion buybacks, which could have instead been used to:
Build 140,000,000 sqft of high schools, or, around 1200 $45,000,000 high schools.
Or
Could have provided ~6.3 million women with young children or infants with supplemental health and nutrition through the WIC program for 9.91 YEARS.
Or
1120 $50 million mental health facilities
Or
According to Dept of HUD, would have been 280% of the total needed to eradicate homelessness entirely from the country,
Or
Fed 5,090,904 families of 4, for a total of 71.2 million people, or 20% of the entire population of the country for an entire year.
Or
Put solar panels on 3.5 million homes.
Wow great info, thanks so much for doing all that legwork! It makes sense that Putin would put less stock into the policy than did his predecessors, because while the leaked Soviet archives show the USSR was genuinely terrified of nuclear war and mostly built up in response to US expansion of nuclear programs, I feel like Putin sees it more as a tool for intimidation.