Some companies DON'T like to pay out cash dividends. This usually happens with companies largely owned by rich individuals. When a company pays dividends, the stock holders have to claim this as taxable income. If the company instead just keeps the cash, the stock value goes up, and stockholders do not have to pay income tax on the increased stock value until it is sold. MS is the same way.
Yet, today, America's leaders are reenacting every folly that brought these great powers [Russia, Germany, and Japan] to ruin -- from arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new 'crusades,' to handing out war guarantees to regions and countries where Americans have never fought before. We are piling up the kind of commitments that produced the greatest disasters of the twentieth century.
— Pat Buchanan – A Republic, Not an Empire
