<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>rpcope1</author><text>Buybacks shouldn&amp;#x27;t have ever been made legal in the first place, as the fears that cause them to be regulated in the first place have really come to pass. I&amp;#x27;m sure someone will right on queue chime in and talk about how buybacks are superior to dividends for a whole lot of reasons, the least abstract being that they&amp;#x27;re ostensibly tax advantaged. I really believe we&amp;#x27;d all be better off if they went back to being banned and equities go back to just issuing dividends (which I strongly believe is better and more intuitive for small time investors).&lt;p&gt;If nothing else, even though I&amp;#x27;m sure a lot of wall street types will lose their mind, buybacks absolutely should not be tax advantaged in relation to dividends.</text><parent_chain><item><author>NickC25</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know how we could through legislation mandate things like banning the US government from doing biz with companies that underpay their workers and enrich their C-Suite handsomely, but I support it.&lt;p&gt;With executive pay being over 500x what the average worker at the company makes, no wonder there&amp;#x27;s effectively 2 Americas - our social contract has been broken.  While Japan has its own issues, the social contract between low-wage and high-wage workers has been intact and there&amp;#x27;s a reason they don&amp;#x27;t have some of the issues that we do in terms of class disparity and the long-term ramifications of one class of already privileged individuals making astronomical amounts of money by screwing over everyone else.&lt;p&gt;We also need to ban buybacks, or tax them &lt;i&gt;REALLY&lt;/i&gt; heavily - over 100%.  Make it wildly unprofitable to do so.  Or, I like this idea better: for every $10 million you spend on buybacks, you loose your right as a corporation or an officer of a corporation to lobby local, state, and federal governments in any way for a year.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>America&apos;s best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees</title><url>https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>walthamstow</author><text>I like this, hit &amp;#x27;em where it hurts, which for most corps is their ability to lobby the state</text><parent_chain><item><author>NickC25</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know how we could through legislation mandate things like banning the US government from doing biz with companies that underpay their workers and enrich their C-Suite handsomely, but I support it.&lt;p&gt;With executive pay being over 500x what the average worker at the company makes, no wonder there&amp;#x27;s effectively 2 Americas - our social contract has been broken.  While Japan has its own issues, the social contract between low-wage and high-wage workers has been intact and there&amp;#x27;s a reason they don&amp;#x27;t have some of the issues that we do in terms of class disparity and the long-term ramifications of one class of already privileged individuals making astronomical amounts of money by screwing over everyone else.&lt;p&gt;We also need to ban buybacks, or tax them &lt;i&gt;REALLY&lt;/i&gt; heavily - over 100%.  Make it wildly unprofitable to do so.  Or, I like this idea better: for every $10 million you spend on buybacks, you loose your right as a corporation or an officer of a corporation to lobby local, state, and federal governments in any way for a year.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>America&apos;s best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees</title><url>https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/09/low-wage-100/</url></story>