Sen. Marco Rubio unleashed a Twitter rant on stock buybacks that you might expect from Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but not necessarily the Florida Republican.

Since 1980 have steady trend of corporate profits flowing back into financial markets & less of these profits invested in increasing productivity through innovation, technology, equipment etc. The result is not enough increase in productivity, growth or widespread prosperity 2/9 — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2019

This is evidenced by fact that over the last 4 years our largest corporations borrowed money in order to fund buybacks & dividends. This money they borrowed did nothing to make company more profitable or productive. And they have to pay interest on the money!



4/9 — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2019

I support free market over socialism b/c market better than govt at encouraging investment & innovation needed for widespread prosperity. But tax code discourages best aspect of free market by giving buybacks a deferral advantage over dividends or investment



6/9 — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2019

Right now don’t have a “free market”. We have tax code which engineers economy in favor of inflating prices of shares at the expense of future productivity & job creation. If we are going to use tax code to incentivize behavior, it should be investing in productivity & jobs



8/9 — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2019

Will soon file bill making immediate expensing permanent & tax corporate buybacks same way as dividends. No tax advantage for buybacks over dividends. But we’re going to give permanent preference to investments that will drive the creation of jobs & increase in wages.



9/9 — Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2019

Last year saw a record $1.1 trillion in stock buybacks, the common term for when a company buys back its own stock from the marketplace.

Of course, the precursor for this was Republican tax bill championed by President Donald Trump, which Rubio voted for. The new law lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, and many economists predicted it would go toward stock buybacks, and not necessarily an investment in growth or wages like Republican leaders promised.

Those economists were largely right as the impact of the cuts have been much more mixed than the administration promised, according to recent reports on the affects of the law after a year. It has also ballooned the deficit (Republican leaders said it would do the opposite, arguing people would have more money and higher wages to spend) leading to a record national debt.

Rubio’s enthusiasm for the Trump tax cut has always been more measured than some of his GOP colleagues. He threatened to vote against it unless the bill’s authors added a larger tax credit for working families, which they did.

It’s also not clear there’s any momentum within his own caucus to dis-incentivize buybacks in the tax code. For example, his Florida counterpart, Rick Scott, wasn’t bothered by how the corporations spent their money, he told the Tampa Bay Times earlier this year.

“I don’t know that everybody is going to spend the money exactly the way I would have them spend the money,” Scott said. “But however they spend the money, it goes back to a person, right?”