crazycanuck

Was this Cobalt?

Postmedia owns the leading daily newspapers in most Canadian cities. They required the papers' editorial boards to endorse the Harper government in our current federal election. Given the scope of their ownership and reach, this is a remarkable perversion of the press in favor of a couple of hedge funds who own Postmedia. I built an ad (and paywall script) blocker targeted only at their properties, and plan to submit to Apple later today. Pull requests welcome.

Canary is an anonymous, secure alternative I've been working on. Check it out if you'd like: www.canaryapp.net

Definitely true. I was just logged in as Blackberry and had full access to all the BBM apps (!). Seems to have reverted to my proper account now. Will share a screenshot momentarily.

Very good point, I was unaware these were still in effect (haven't been a US tax payer in several years).

I think it's worth clarifying what's meant by the "double taxation of dividends". This refers to the fact that the company (at least in theory) already paid taxes on its profits, which are then taxed again as ordinary income when passed on to shareholders in the form of dividends. Arguably, this second tax occurs even when the profits are returned as capital gains (which is the case with buybacks), but in that case a) the tax rate is much lower, and b) the shareholder can choose to defer the tax payment by simply holding onto the stock until a future date. Long story short, the preference for buybacks over dividends is not about avoiding double taxation per se, but rather minimizing the tax rate of profit distributions. Per OP, one way to fix this would be to tax them the same regardless of the distribution mechanism.

This isn't really the issue. See my comment above, which in your example translates to the tax rate in company one's scenario being ~2x the rate in company two's.