It’s a lot of money, but not enough for fundamental change. It would of been enough collectively to pay for the stimulus we are doing now though.

0 - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sp-500-companies-spent-7-t...

I'm not sure why you'd need additional taxes at all, when it seems that deflationary pressure is so great that you can summon up trillions with little inflationary consequence. $35 billion/year seems like nothing compared to this.

A fiscal stimulus of that size would almost certainly drive demand (during a pandemic that has caused a negative supply shock) and therefore increase inflation.

If you want to tax profits, then tax profits. If you want to have cheesy loophole tax avoidance, stock buy-backs might be more your style.

What you want to do is create an artificial incentive for not returning the capital, which will lead to its suboptimal allocation. Companies will either sit on their cash, or they will be putting it into projects they would otherwise not be doing.

That’s called a “dividend”. A dividend is taxed, however. I’ll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

What you want to do is create an artificial incentive for not returning the capital, which will lead to its suboptimal allocation.

I truly don’t know what to make of this comment. On the one hand, we are all being mansplained on how stock buy-backs works, yet not one mention of the word “dividend”.

You know what else is taxed? When a company buys back stock, reducing the number of shares outstanding so that each share represents more of the ongoing business, thus sending its stock price higher. The tax on this is called a "capital gains tax," perhaps you've heard of it?