According to a new report, major corporations that pay their employees some of the lowest wages of any industry have spent half a trillion dollars on stock buybacks over the past five years, while inflation and corporate profits have soared.

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found in a report released Thursday that the 100 companies in the S&P 500 that pay their workers the lowest median wage spent a whopping $522 billion on stock buybacks between 2019 and 2023 – spending that boosts their stock value and directly enriches their wealthy shareholders and corporate boards.

Lowe’s spent the most on stock buybacks among this group, shelling out nearly $43 billion for buyback programs while the average salary was $32,626. Lowe’s paid its CEO $18 million in compensation. Home Depot was the second-largest spender on low-wage company buybacks, spending $37 billion on such programs while the company’s employees earned an average of just $35,131 – far below the average living wage in the United States and in some places almost poverty wages.

These expenses could have gone toward salaries and benefits for employees or even toward corporate investments such as capital expenditures, the report said, but instead they were spent on enriching executives.

Walmart, for example, spent on stock buybacks nearly five times what it paid into its employees’ 401(k) plans — $31 billion. The average Walmart employee earned $27,642 in 2023, while the CEO received $27 million, nearly 1,000 times the company’s median salary.

As companies have inflated prices and taken advantage of economic instability to dramatically increase their costs in recent years, stock buyback programs have reached record levels with no end in sight. Analysts have said the amount U.S. companies spend on share buybacks could reach $1 trillion annually as companies shower money on rich investors — while, not coincidentally, wealth inequality is also reaching record levels.

Stock buyback programs were banned decades ago but revived by the Ronald Reagan administration. The sweeping Republican tax reform in 2017, led by Donald Trump, gave corporations the freedom to buy back even more stock, freeing up hundreds of billions that would otherwise have been taxed.

“The massive corporate tax cut in the Republicans’ 2017 tax reform led to an explosion of stock buybacks, a financial fraud that artificially inflates the value of CEOs’ stock-based compensation. This wasteful practice is particularly obscene when companies pay starvation wages,” said report author Sarah Anderson. “We found that the nation’s 100 largest low-wage companies spent over half a trillion dollars on stock buybacks to inflate CEOs’ salaries while many of their workers barely had anything to eat.”

The gap between executive and worker pay is enormous. In 2023, the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay at the lowest-paying companies was an astonishing 538 to 1 — with the CEO making an average of $14.7 million and workers making an average of $34,522, the report found. The worst offender last year was Ross, the report found, whose CEO made 2,100 times the company’s median worker salary: $18.1 million to $8,618.

IPS notes that lawmakers seeking to curb share buybacks could, among other things, expand restrictions and taxes on share buyback programs.

“At a time when our country is deeply divided on so many issues, there is tremendous common ground among Americans on the problem of extreme pay disparities between CEOs and workers,” Anderson said. “Poll after poll shows that Americans from all political camps are fed up with overpaid CEOs and want lawmakers to do something.”