It's the shareholders cashing out, so rather than a failed business with shares of $0 value, they have money and the loans are someone else's problem.
What about using revenue to buy it? You don't have to use (or have) debt to buy something with revenue.
So you could still be giving away money to cash out that is owed to someone else? If your revenue is based upon fictional income then these privatised public services will become tax payer problems because they can't be shut down.
> buybacks in any other fashion only increase debt.
- buybacks are taxed when a person gets money for their shares, as capital gains tax
- lots of corporate tax is about exactly the opposite of what you say; i.e. reaching inside a company's bank account and taxing its profits directly, rather than waiting for the money to flow out and taxing it as VAT/income tax/cap gains. A huge amount of money and effort is spent on balancing this correctly, with R&D credits, structuring profits to appear in the correct year, etc etc.
