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I never see anyone complaining about buybacks because of tax reasons though. In particular, the author is complaining companies are not spending enough on R&D because of buybacks.

It is true that buybacks are more tax efficient than dividends, which is why companies generally do buybacks instead of dividends.

The US tax on capital gains is definitely a mess though.

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I was mostly responding to the "but they can't be spent either" part. From my perspective there isn't that much difference if a company is doing a buyback vs a dividend, as long as it's sharing its profits with the investors (w/o that, I view the stock market as a legal Ponzi scheme); I'm not really commenting on how much money should transfer to the shareholders though.

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