Imagine yourself sitting in a corporate chief executive suite. You run a Fortune 500 corporation, and you’re facing the biggest decision of your career. Lawmakers have just enacted the largest corporate tax cut in world history. Hundreds of millions of unexpected dollars, maybe billions, will soon be pouring into your corporate coffers.

The immediate question for you, the CEO: What are you going to do with this incredible windfall?

You have options, plenty of options. You can invest your golden windfall in new plants and equipment. You can put money into R&D and create exciting new products. You can retrain your workers and reward them — with higher pay — for their increased productivity.

All reasonable choices. Which would you pick? Or would you choose some combination of all three?

In real life, America’s top corporate executives are facing exactly this same set of choices. And they’re picking . . . none of the above!

These execs are choosing instead to devote a huge chunk of their windfall to “stock buybacks.” Instead of investing in their corporate long-range future, they’re shelling out billions buying back shares of their own stock on the open market.

Last year, U.S. corporate outlays for buybacks totaled $800 billion. The buyback pace this year has quickened, as top execs rush to “invest” the savings they’re realizing from the GOP corporate tax cut enacted last December. In May alone, corporate CEOs bought back $174 billion worth of their shares, “an all-time record” for a single month.

None of these buyback billions will make America’s corporations more creative or productive. What will these buyback billions do? They’ll simply, as Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Steven Pearlstein noted last week, redistribute “even more of the nation’s wealth to corporate executives, wealthy investors, and Wall Street financiers.”