Corporate America to Bernie Sanders: Paying dividends isn't evil

Corporate America wants Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to know there’s another side to their claim that rewarding investors with higher dividends and stock buybacks benefits the wealthy at the expense of the working class.

“Returning some profits to shareholders is not necessarily a bad thing,” Josh Bolten, president of the Business Roundtable, and Ken Bertsch, executive director of the Council of Institutional Investors, wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times published Sunday. “Some critics of buybacks miss this point: Money returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends does not disappear from the economy.”