He writes that Chuck Schumer “has spent as much time as an NFL linebacker as he has in private enterprise,” and that for Joe Biden, “the private sector is a region as foreign as Outer Mongolia.” Will writes, “Hostility to buybacks arises from foggy economic thinking that is encouraged by the progressive animus against the people and processes that create the wealth that progressives delight in redistributing.”

Really, buybacks are a way of returning profits to shareholders, similar to dividends. Democrats object that that money is not going into more productive uses. But, as Andrew Stuttaford wrote in August, “the argument that management might have decided that that productive use does not exist, and that it would be better (directly or indirectly) to return capital to the company’s shareholders — which is to say its owners — so that they can deploy it elsewhere generally goes unmentioned.”