I was reading up on Michael Tubbs, the former Stockton Mayor who started a basic income pilot. I was curious why he didn’t win reelection. Here was the story I found.

He has started a larger group of Mayors championing a basic income. That is a great legacy of his career so far.  

In other basic income pilot news, Sam Altman’s Y-combinator is still working on their basic income pilots. And Sam Altman has written a very thought provoking piece on basic income. He proposes this income be funded by the following – “We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars.” 

This year Apple is spending $90 billion in share buybacks, which is about 4% worth of their company value when valued at $2.17 trillion dollars.

As far as how profitable other companies are, the answer is “very profitable”. 

“We already have American tax payers supporting companies, first banks and GM  in 2008 and now airlines in 2020 when they might go bankrupt, or when they do. But the American People aren’t getting paid back for their support. 

So I think it’s only fair for taxpayers to get a substantial piece of the upside in return for bailing out these companies. And in the process, bailing out their shareholders, who would be left with nothing if the companies failed.

Yes, this is the same point I made last week about a taxpayer bailout of Boeing.

But it’s a point that we should keep in mind every time we see companies line up at the bailout trough. If many of these companies hadn’t spent lots of money to buy back their own stock to prop up its price, they wouldn’t need anywhere near as much money as they need now.

That’s especially true of these four airlines. Almost seven out of every eight dollars the four airlines sent Wall Street from 2015 through 2019–$39.1 billion out of $44.7 billion — went for share buybacks. The rest went for dividends, according to my calculations based on the companies’ Securities & Exchange Commission filings.” – Washington Post

We need to move to a system that focus on humans, not the economy and profits. 

This would be something similar to human centered capitalism, as promoted by Andrew Yang. 

We already have some institutions that their sole driver is not profit. Credit unions supposedly have their owners, who are also their users, needs as a priority, instead of just profit. 

Vanguard is a company that both serves it’s owners and it’s users.

If we increased the base of each companies shareholders to include everyone, there would be more incentive to “help everyone” instead of “maximize profits”.

While researching this I stumbled upon this series of articles about Stakeholder value. It is quite interesting. Here are some top comments, but I suggest reading it for yourself. 

“The most successful firms today are those that pursue what Peter Drucker long ago saw to be “true North” for a corporation: “there is only one valid purpose of a corporation: to create a customer”. Generating fresh value for customers is the foundation the basis for generating benefits for all the stakeholders.” – Forbes

Finally, another thing that would help small business and entrepreneurs everywhere, as well as helping people stay health is Universal health care in the USA.

“You know what would really help me as a business owner? Universal health care. The money we pay to subsidize employee health care is astronomical and grows every year. I’ll happily pay higher taxes to cut out health insurance companies that make $40 billion a year in profit.” – Dan Price CEO

Admittedly this is a fairly loosely held together narrative of ideas I’ve been thinking about lately, but I hope by sharing them it gets other people thinking about them too.