stock buybacks

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    Follow the Money: Corporate Profits Edition — If Families Pay More, Who’s Cashing In?

    ByPhil McCracken

    Somebody says “inflation” like it’s weather—mysterious, unavoidable, and definitely not anyone’s balance sheet. Meanwhile, the receipts-in-your-grocery-cart logic is: prices at the register climb (+22.4%), the total gets bigger ($124.37), and the winners get a whole ladder of upgrades—record earnings / net income at an all-time high, exec pay rising, and stock buybacks doing the victory lap.

    So when the grown-ups in the room start telling you to blame workers, I’m just following the invoice: if families pay more and corporate wealth keeps moving up, the blame game is the distraction. The question isn’t “Who’s to blame?” It’s “Who’s cashing in?”

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    Productivity Went Up—Pay Didn’t Keep Up (So Who Collected the Difference?)

    ByHugh Jass

    Productivity went up. Pay didn’t keep up. Coincidence? Absolutely not—Exhibit A had a pulse. The file says for decades beginning in the 1940s, productivity and compensation marched together, then the 1970s came and—per the BLS-backed timeline—things steadily diverged, with the “gap” indexed to 1948 showing real hourly compensation falling behind as output climbed.

    So what do workers “see,” besides more output, more speed, and more pressure? The same old version of the economy’s magic trick: margins, bonuses, buybacks, and stock gains in the hands of “the top,” while the checkbook refuses to catch up. The gap isn’t natural. It’s a choice—just one with a beneficiary already paid and a workforce politely told to call it inevitable, even when the paperwork is sitting there blinking $25,000,000 like a notarized receipt.

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