The 1% tax on stock buybacks signed into law last month would have raised about $8.4 billion from the biggest publicly traded U.S. companies if it had been in effect last year, absorbing the equivalent of nearly a half-percentage-point of net income overall, a new analysis finds.
The financial impact would have been similar to raising the combined effective tax rate for the companies to 17.95% from 17.56%, according to financial data firm S&P Dow Jones Indices, which analyzed the buybacks for companies in the S&P 500 index.