Not OP, but I’ll take a stab at it: he’s saying that the NYT is overly liberal, frequently trashes businesses as being tax evaders and plagues on society, misses its own hypocrisy, and doesn’t live up to its historical pedigree when it comes to fact checking.
NYT and a few other papers are pretty much running in campaign mode, floating trial balloons of policy ideas of candidates they favor if not outright pushing forward a narrative which aligns with the direction one campaign or another is following. So stories align to support the narrative.
The 2020 narrative for the Democratic Party is again wealth envy and how all the woes can be solved if X just pays their fair share. The easy villains are billionaires and large well known companies. After all it is damn easy to make numbers appear however you want; see the recent claim Amtrak might make a profit which is only true if you don't look hard.
we are already deep into the election cycle for the next President and Congress so you must use a heavy filter on stories you read on the NYT and even here. you can pretty much toss any story that gets around to mentioning one candidate or another.
You have to use a filter on just about anything that you read, but the point by so many others remain: Not a single person in this thread or from Fedex has actually rebutted the journalist's claims in the original article.
> Is that because you think that the federal government doesn't properly utilize the tax dollars that it receives?
Not the OP but this is absolutely how I feel. I think I would only be happy to pay taxes if every single dollar I spent was accounted for with a way to track progress on what is being funded. Missing milestones or goals would result in me paying no more taxes on that project until whatever management in place was restructured.
Anything not dealing with politics is pretty decent, but nearly everything they print now has to have some political slant or cheap shot at the current administration.
I remember reading a recent article about the drought in California. Pretty well written article, but of course about midway through the article there were two paragraphs highlighting Trump's opinion that climate change isn't real, blah blah blah. Even though the whole mess has been a direct result of the state government completely mismanaging their own resources.
It's no wonder most people on the right just completely discount them now as a reliable new source. It wasn't always the case, but from the time of the beginning of the 2016 election to now, it's all been downhill.
Journalists and editors should not let the business practices of the paper they work for prevent them from investigating and publishing stories. This is a feature, not a bug.
The story is inconsistent - we have tax policy to encourage innovation and investment, the new york times supports this style of policy. They call out people who actually then take the government up on the incentives.
The critique of the tax cut also didn't make a lot of sense.
It's just a poor story - it's unclear what it's objective is.
If they are going to do that, I’d expect disclosure: “Your revered newspaper is misrepresenting facts and also does worse than the entity we’re calling out”. Or at least “We also do the things we call others out on.”
It's not at all incumbent on journalists to moderate their reporting based on the ownership of their publication. I don't understand why it's relevant. FedEx is within their rights to criticize the NY Times as an institution, but it doesn't make their reporting any less accurate. And Smith didn't even try to refute any of the details of the story.
Their house is in order. From the original article:
> The public face of its lobbying effort, which included a tax proposal of its own, was FedEx’s founder and chief executive, Frederick Smith, who repeatedly took to the airwaves to champion the power of tax cuts. “If you make the United States a better place to invest, there is no question in my mind that we would see a renaissance of capital investment,” he said on an August 2017 radio show hosted by Larry Kudlow, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council.
FedEx lobbied for these cuts, and argued they'd invest more capital if they were made reality. They got what they wanted, and didn't do what they said.
There's nothing less genuine than flat out claiming a claim is not factual without providing proof or even pointing out specifics. It's clear Fedex is deflecting here. Nothing more.
Uh, I don't see any substance in the pushback. Is there any?
E.g., how does the fact that the NYTimes paid no federal income tax in 2017 address or refute anything in the article?
Likewise the other financial facts about the NYTimes doesn't seem related.
The times article is about how the tax cuts did not result in the capital investments promised, by FexEx and others.
Now, if the times had lobbied for the tax cut and likewise claimed capital gains investments would increase but then they didn't, that would be relevant.
>The times article is about how the tax cuts did not result in the capital investments promised, by FexEx and others.
Drive by IND on 70, you can see the capital investment that was one of the promises of this. Hub expansion via construction (similar construction at MEM). The construction at IND is so large you can actually see it from the other side of the airport, I know because I see it every weekday when I pull into the parking lot at work.
Thank you for providing evidence. That's certainly a much larger capital investment than the NYT has ever made. Why is this downvoted when the parent comment asked for proof?
You claim that FedEx added some square footage to a warehouse, and then a comment replied to you saying "that's a much larger investment than the NYT has ever made" and then I cited a large investment that the NYT has made. The time range was expanded to "ever" with that comment.
The New York Times building has twice as much square footage than the claimed 800,000 square feet that FedEx added.
So you can kind of see where I'm going. Although it's stupid to argue that a newspaper can't write an article about something if they haven't invested as much money in real estate as the subject of their article... it appears that they have, so as dumb as that argument is, it's not even correct.
>You claim that FedEx added some square footage to a warehouse,
They didn't 'add some square footage to a warehouse" they are building multiple brand new buildings, with brand new equipment, drastically increasing their sort operation at IND by 800,000 square feet and are also expanding at MEM as well as building a brand new facility just south of Indianapolis.
Buying a building /= building a new state of the art sort facility full of conveyors, scanners, etc.
You aren't really addressing the claims in the times story though. They didn't say FedEx had zero capital investment. They said there wasn't the promised increase.
From the article:
> ...As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019.
So maybe you can argue that the times numbers are bad with some numbers of your own? Maybe you can argue with some numbers that this hub expansion is just getting started and over the next few years will represent a nice increase in capital spending? As it is, you aren't really arguing anything.
>You aren't really addressing the claims in the times story though
I'm also not FedEx and am replying to a specific comment, that I quoted, in this thread and not the article. The construction is active, it has been active for over a year now.
The IndyStar article also links to another article, with yet more construction, going on just south of Indianapolis at 259 million dollars.
The comment I replied to stated
>did not result in the capital investments promised
I linked to one example, and referenced a second, of them actively carrying out those capital investments.
Lets look at the facts as reported by the NYT:
1. Fedex owed 1.5 Billion in taxes in 2017.
2. They owe 0 in taxes after the bill.
3. As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019. Much of its savings have gone to reward shareholders: FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.
They are not disputing those numbers at all.
What they want to do is "The focus of the debate should be federal tax policy and the relative societal benefits of business investments and the enormous intended benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners."
Bet seeing those numbers (2017 Tax bill: $1,500,000,000, 2018 tax bill: $0) must have stung and Fedex is frantically trying to change the topic of conversation.
It is indeed odd to single out a particular company for paying zero in tax (fedex in this case) as the result of a temporary tax reform bill which it seems the newspaper also took part in.
While perhaps the NYT's story was 'correct', it neglected to point out that other companies also took advantage of this fact and that indeed this was the purpose of the tax reform. Instead, it sounds like the NYT made Fedex into some kind of bogeyman attempting to avoid taxes, instead of telling the full story, which is that, by American government policy, the government of the United States of America decided to offer businesses a way to significantly reduce their federal tax bill by investing their money into capital assets.
This is a much less sinister sounding headline, which is likely why the NYT neglected to publish it.
It's like if the government passed a bill to reward families that have children in the next five years with 10k USD each, and, instead of reporting on this bill in general, the new york times decided to only report on why bob and sally had four kids in those five years to milk the government of money. It's dishonest reporting, which is unsurprising coming from the new york times.
But based on the this statement, I'm inclined to believe that everything the NYT published was, in fact, true. No where in the statement does it call into question any of the facts, just calling it an "outrageous distortion" of the truth. Which implies it is true, though he certainly takes issue with the characterization of the truth.
So if expected behavior of the NYT is factual reporting, I'd say they're on the money!
The "whataboutism" is the crux of the issue though. Everyone does their best to minimize their tax burden every year - this is completely rational behavior. I don't know what point the NYT was trying to make, other than maybe showing that FedEx has some good accountants. The debate that we should be having, and the one that FedEx is perhaps crudely trying to edge us toward, is whether these tax policies actually "help". They are going to say it does, and that they invest that money in the broader economy. The NYT would probably say something similar with regard to the value of journalism.
Did you read the NYTimes article? The article is more about how FedEx didn't re-invest the money saved on taxes like they claimed they would. Instead they put used it for stock buybacks and dividends. The NYTimes article was about the very thing you said it should be about.
Whataboutism is justifying one party's actions by pointing at another party and saying "they do it too."
This isn't that. Fedex is saying that they do a lot more for the national economy that the NYT. They pay more in taxes, they invest more in assets, etc.
Why is this even up for debate? Why would anyone think that the NYT is more useful to the economy than FedEx? Why do people continue to put ""journalism"" on such a high pedestal? Like, what actual value did the NYT article produce? At worst it could have potentially negatively affected the FedEx stock price and overall popular perception, for no good reason other than to generate clicks/ad views.
If you look through the comments, it's because some people would like to transfer wealth from the top 10% of earners to the bottom 90%, or maybe even the top 50% to the bottom 50%, and the NYT is a useful tool in educating people about why that is a moral act, e.g. FedEx is bad and didn't pay their fair share, and also some people earn more than others, therefore...
Why would anyone think that the NYT is more useful to the economy than FedEx?
Here's one point of view that doesn't come up as often as it should: the First Amendment doesn't say anything about churches that it doesn't also say about the press. Yet we don't tax churches on the grounds that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." [1]
If it weren't for this double standard, the Times would indeed be justified in paying zero tax.
I'd be fine with that as long as we get to start referring to "journalists" as priests or clergymen or whatever, at least then things would be a bit more honest.
> the First Amendment doesn't say anything about churches that it doesn't also say about the press.
It assuredly does say different things:
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If a newspaper didn't want to pay taxes they can form themselves as a non profit as churches largely do. It's been done before, e.g. ProPublica, Institute for Non-profit News, Crosscut, The Texas Tribune, and many more.
Either taxes "abridge freedom" or they don't. Which is it?
In reality, the language in the First Amendment is nowhere near sufficient to justify granting tax exemptions to an entire industry, be it religious or secular.
That's a rather bleak, mechanistic view of society.
Journalism provides information, without which voters are unable to make decisions any better than random chance. Democracy cannot function in the absence of information.
Here, specifically, the NYT is contributing to the public's knowledge of the effects of the tax cut: people were promised expanding businesses investments as an outcome of letting them keep all those billions. This not happening should inform peoples' willingness to try that strategy again.
30 years ago this article would have never been published in the paper, or it would be a tiny article tucked deep in the financial section or whatever. But nowadays they have to do anything to get clicks/ad views/subscriptions/attention, because that's the game now. They'll write a headline like the FedEx one because they naively think they can do so without repercussion because they're stuck in the old mindset of being the unassailable trusted authoritative arbiters of truth. No, as it turns out, when a company does a thing that can potentially harm another company financially, the other company can now publicly fight back for all to see online. "Journalists," as well as many in this thread, still struggle to acclimate to the reality of this relatively newly leveled playing field. You can't just publish whatever anymore from an ivory tower of "journalism" and expect someone, individual or corporation, to not fight back online.
> In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing.
> Its financial filings show it owed no taxes in the 2018 fiscal year overall. Company officials said FedEx paid $2 billion in total federal income taxes over the past 10 years.
So in the last 10 years FedEx paid $2B in taxes, of which $1.5B was paid in 2017. That seems really weird. Does anyone know enough about their financials to explain how this happened?
Page 60 of their 2019 annual report will show you (link below). The TCJA (Tax Cut/Job Act) removed $1.354 billion from what they were expected to pay. They had several other benefits against their overall tax rate, but that was by far the highest in 2018. It lead to them owing -5% in taxes or $219 million.
I didn't read all of this but "taxes" is a loaded question.
I'm assuming the $2B is about payroll taxes, their share of federal income tax for W2 employees. All companies with these type of employees pay some of these (along with SS and workman's comp, etc.)
There is another question of corporate taxes. Corporate taxes work different than individual taxes.
For individuals we: EARN > PAY TAKES > SPEND. However, for corporations they: EARN > SPEND > PAY TAXES. This means that all companies can choose to pay no corporate taxes ever. This is purposeful and the intent of the tax code is to encourage reinvestment and expansion and capital expenditures like new equipment because this keeps more people employed long term. This is always why people don't understand when company X paid $0 in corporate taxes. It is a choice. It should be expected from someone like Amazon who re-invests so heavily.
Now if a company wants to have cash on hand or do stock buybacks, they they must realize this money and pay taxes on it. The new tax laws made this a much much more attractive proposition. The "promise" was that this would be spent on expansion however most was spent on stock buybacks which is a large driver of the stock market up in the last year despite interest rates around zero and rapidly slowing growth. It seems to me that this is the jist of the NYT article. The $0 is just to grab headlines. Lots of companies lobbied for these cuts for "expansion" but none of them did. They took the opportunity to leverage it against stock price which makes sense for the C suite since that is a major part of their compensation. This is another reason that board members, C suite and VPs of public companies should not be paid in stocks or options or RSUs.
I love this idea – of an actual, genuine debate on this topic where an actual corporate executive can make some points (I know they will be Tim-Cook-like spin but debate is better than asynchronous speeches where people talk at each other)
Update: I realized I didn't write the second half of my sentence... which makes me sound like a corporate shill.
The second half is... AND someone on the other side can immediately call bullshit on their spin, but we can have a proper debate on the inadequacy of current Federal tax policy.
Well only if an explanation about how these companies arrive at these low tax payments. It is one thing to say "You did it too" but the public cannot be properly served unless we have a factual discussion of why their tax payments are this low and the benefits to both the company and public at large are shown.
eighty thousand plus pages of tax laws aren't meant to be simply to understand nor do the outcomes always make sense. the NYT would better serve the public showing just how abusive the tax law is because it mostly it is a political tool for calling in favors and punishing those who don't play ball besides being a revenue tool.
It would be great to have a few fact sheets sent through beforehand, and main questions published and moderated properly, as opposed to a political high level back and forth solving nothing.
In my opinion, debates are all about spin. They're too short to allow proper analysis of the responses, and mostly concern the personalities of the people.
Two examples: T.H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, and a round-table I once attended with Dijkstra and Larry Loucks of IBM, along with a couple of other professors who were completely outclassed by those two. EWD was slow and very precise, it was clear that he was thinking deeply about the topics, but he didn't actually say much in the time alloted; Larry was fast, facile, and rather shallow, he was of the IBM style (he who talks loudest is in charge).
I agree that typical debates are far from perfect, but NY Times and many other media outlets are reporting a very biased slant on this topic. There’s effectively only one voice on the debate stage.
We’ve seen this many times before. A cartoon character of a complex issue is created, and the media pump out clickbait stories based on that.
What’s the most effective way to motivate a more accurate discussion of this topic?
Are you saying that every time the New York Times publishes an article, and a corporation disagrees with the vetted, researched facts published by the paper of record in the United States, that we should hear out the corporation in a pubic forum?
I vehemently disagree. Facts are not up for debate, no matter how much money is behind the people who would like to debate them.
Additionally, implying that corporate executives don't have a platform to push their side of whatever argument they are fighting is inane.
Wow, that's not at all what I'm saying. Believe me, I am STRONGLY in the camp of "these goddamn companies need to be held accountable for their tax dodging."
However, you can't change the _fact_ that what they're doing is "legal." The issue is with federal tax policy that needs to be changed.
I'm talking about the nature of calling bullshit on what companies do to their face, rather than PR firms talking to each other, and there's value in that.
Here's the spin that happens (and it's especially bad because it's just published without much challenge):
Any company that dodges taxes always say (to quote Tim Cook): "We pay every single penny of taxes we owe" – which says NOTHING about all the tax dodging these companies did to arrive at a minuscule bill of what was owed, and then, sure, they paid what they owed, correct.
But in that format, where Cook makes a speech, and then someone writes a rebuttal article 2 weeks later, nothing really gets done.
In a debate format, you can quickly say "yeah that's bullshit. You're making a semantic and laser focused argument. It's like saying you didn't kill that person by strangling them, they died because their brain stopped receiving oxygenated blood."
And there's a public record of you pushing back against this BS corporate-speak. You _can't_ do that in the normal, traditional way this is done, which is that:
1) newspaper publishes article of wrongdoing
2) PR firm publishes press release with insane amounts of spin
3) nothing changes.
It would continue to seem like the argument here is that we should want corporations to rebut NYT articles in a public forum, which I continue to disagree with, regardless of what the argument is.
While we should hold the "truth" to account, open debate cannot be the way to deal with this at every impasse. FedEx is more than welcome to write an article, post a video, or do anything else to rebut the article published by the NYT, but instead has chosen a narrow path in which they can surprise the other party in person with attacks. I fail to understand why open debate is the best way to solve this; at the very least, I don't know where the time to watch these debates about... FedEx and tax avoidance... among the other issues I try to keep current on
Eh, real-time live debates are terrible formats for this because they encourage and reward Gish Gallops. This is why scientists stopped debating creationists, because they discovered through repeated trials that it just rewards people who have less shame and are always willing to spout more lies. In theory, the other guy can call BS, but generally it takes a little bit of time, even with Google, to figure out where the lie is, and then even longer to explain it, by which point the liar simply moves on to another one.
Failing new York times. If only liberals weren't so enamored with their deliveries while they sit at home and watch CNN they'd probably label FedEx as orange man coconspolirator.
The establishment media made up Russian collusion and after 2 years refuses to apologize for 100% made up claims. They had the balls to give themselves pulitzer and ruin it's legacy. Thank God FedEx is pushing back.
This statement is a farce. They claim the story is factually incorrect, but provide no corrections. They point out the NYT does the same thing, but that does not contradict anything in the NYT article, and has no bearing on what they did. Finally, they yell "debate me!" but rather than proposing a debate on the facts in dispute, instead want to debate federal tax policy which neither controls.
I think it's a great statement. They aren't disputing the facts. Fedex is disputing that cutting taxes is a bad thing and is saying lets talk about it.
EDIT: and as you pointed out Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.
They don't actually list the facts they dispute, they just make that generic statement and then list some unrelated facts that paint them in a flattering light and hope that you assume those were the facts the NYT got wrong.
To be clear, I believe burkaman agrees with you. The post they responded to said that FedEx "is not disputing the facts." burkaman pointed out the part of FedEx's statement where they do just that - except, as you correctly point out, FedEx never says which facts.
I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. The first sentence says the story is "distorted and factually incorrect" and they later call it an "outrageous distortion of the truth". This statement is screaming "fake news" and "debate me" like some Twitter troll. It is crazy to see this as an official statement from a Fortune 100 company.
There was never an era like that, it's more nonsense and outright propaganda from schemers who want to claim that their own free-style lies are just as valid as formal journalism.
What are you talking about? Few have ever had access to printing presses or television studios. Until everyone had a smartphone in their pocket at all times, global information dissemination was controlled by a wealthy few. Now these people have to compete for the same attention as Random Guy On YouTube #337917402. The playing field has been leveled—these behemoth "journalistic" establishments have to compete for the same attention-scraps as everyone else. "Journalists" are not special anymore, they're just the same as everyone else with a smartphone (so, everyone else), yet it seems many struggle to accept this, judging by many comments here and elsewhere.
>as you pointed out Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.
That is incorrect. According to the article FedEx is referencing [1], the NY Times wrote that FedEx (along with UPS) met regularly with Congressional committee staff who were writing the tax policy and pushed hard for their own agenda.
FedEx spent $10 million on lobbying in 2017, in line with previous spending, with much of it focused on tax issues, according to federal records. Its team pushed hard to shape the bill behind the scenes, meeting regularly with House and Senate committee staff who were writing the provisions.
Mr. Smith met with Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in February 2017, and on May 26 he spoke on the phone with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, according to Mr. Mnuchin’s public calendar.
> Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.
Perhaps not individually, but a thrust of the article is that these large corporations pay huge amounts to lobbyists to bend tax policy in their favor.
This is answered in the first paragraph of the nytimes article: "In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard."
They claim the story is factually incorrect, but provide no corrections.
There were two claims in the NY Times story:
1) FedEx paid $0 in tax
2) FedEx "has not made good on its promised investment surge"
In response, FedEx wrote in their statement:
1) our billions of dollars of tax payments whereby they dispute paying $0 in taxes
2) $6 billion of capital that FedEx invested in the U.S. economy
This directly contradicts what the NY Times wrote. And then they further point that the NY Times is actually guilty of what the NY Times is accusing FedEx of. How is their statement a farce?
Further, the problem is that the tax code, especially for corporations, is so complex that anyone's tax payments can be spun any way you want them.
For example, I contributed the maximum allowed to my employer's 401k this year. Someone could spin a news story saying, "300bps is avoiding taxes!" because I legally did not pay tax on $19,000 of income I otherwise would've had to.
I don't know the particulars of FedEx's tax situation and honestly it would probably take me days of studying it before I could scratch the surface of understanding it. If FedEx did something illegal, there is a nice tax bounty the NY Times could get for reporting them - https://www.irs.gov/compliance/whistleblower-informant-award
The NY Times is obviously not aware of anything FedEx did that is illegal so instead they put out a piece accusing them of paying $0 tax and not investing enough.
1) They aren't disputing the "$0 paid in taxes in 2018," which is the main point of the NYTimes article (an article about how companies were responding to the Tax Cuts/Jobs Act). "Billions of dollars in tax payments" is factually correct, but doesn't address the core allegation.
2) $6 billion compared to what (prior to previous years)? No point of reference here.
The response is great theater, but it is carefully worded to not refute the allegations.
I'm not sure I believe that either. The reason that the article focused on 2018 numbers is that they provide a direct comparison pre- and post- Tax Cuts/Jobs Act. In 2018, Fedex paid less tax and invested less compared to 2017 - despite saving $1.6bn. On the other hand, investment in stock buybacks and dividends more than doubled. Not sure how those allegations are "carefully selected"?
I think it's unproductive to try and read all news in bad faith, there are very few things that anyone can truly 100% comprehend and in a democracy we need everyone to be at least somewhat aware of things happening in society.
It’s not necessarily assuming bad faith to realise the existence of the context which leads to the selection and writing of the articles at the New York Times, or Fox News, or Buzzfeed, or Xinhua, or any other outlet.
I agree that all news outlets represent the world view of their reporting and editorial staff. I disagree that it is always accurate to call this a "false narrative."
It doesn't directly contradict what the NYTimes wrote, at all:
1. Fedex is bundling total tax expenditures (state taxes, employment taxes, who knows what, probably the whole kit) versus their federal income tax liability which is what NYTimes is discussing
2. Fedex has been in the 5-6B annual Capex range since FY 2015.
Further, someone could "spin" that 401k treatment, but this is an article about how Fedex rallied hard for specific tax treatments that had a specific effect. So if you wanna go out there and get some carve-out, expect to catch crap for it. If you're a normal person you'll go laughing to the bank with it, but if you're an especially hostile individual I guess you could, like, challenge people to a debate or whatever
It’s interesting that when Mitt Romney said 47% of Americans don’t pay income taxes, the Times pointed out this was misleading because many of those people do pay payroll and other taxes. It seems they are guilty of the same sort of deceptive rhetoric here.
> This directly contradicts what the NY Times wrote.
It does not. FTA:
> But the company ended its 2018 fiscal year having spent $240 million less on capital investments than it predicted it would in December 2017, shortly before the tax cuts passed. The company’s capital spending declined by nearly $175 million in fiscal 2019.
---
> And then they further point that the NY Times is actually guilty of what the NY Times is accusing FedEx of.
The NYT didn't lobby in favor of the tax cuts and argue it would increase business investment, then fail to actually follow through - not to mention that regardless of the NYT's corporate actions, this has nothing to do with their reporting - and on top of that, the article is about the expected effects of the tax cuts vs. the actual effects on a national level with FedEx as a salient example. Countering with "but they did too" is irrelevant to the point at hand.
> The NY Times is obviously not aware of anything FedEx did that is illegal so instead they put out a piece accusing them of paying $0 tax and not investing enough.
You are ascribing motive to the authors that has no basis in fact. The NYT is making the argument the tax cuts didn't do what they were advertised to do. It's the literal subhead on the article:
> How FedEx Cut Its Tax Bill to $0: The company, like much of corporate America, has not made good on its promised investment surge from President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
> They point out the NYT does the same thing, but that does not contradict anything in the NYT article, and has no bearing on what they did. Finally, they yell "debate me!" but rather than proposing a debate on the facts in dispute, instead want to debate federal tax policy which neither controls.
Doesn't the whole NYT article is based on the fact that Fedex influenced the federal tax policy to avoid to pay theses taxes?
Doesn't the goal of NYT by publishing this article is to show how Fedex gained from the new federal tax policies and thus trying to make that change toward something less generous toward Fedex?
Thus NYT believe that Fedex and themselves can influence the federal tax policies which makes a debate the right kind of platform.
So this response says the story is factually incorrect, but doesn't dispute a single fact. If the story is inaccurate, FedEx should describe what was wrong, in detail, and ask for a correction.
The Times newsroom doesn't posit premises (and certainly not the one you suggest) or debate tax policy, it reports facts. I find the ignorance on the basics of journalism and its role in American society on hacker news to be shocking and embarrassing.
Actually, they didn't say anything that challenges a single specific fact from the article.
> They are challenging the underlying premise that corporations are a net negative on society.
The article never made that claim (nor even implied it).
What Fedex is doing is attempting to change the discussion from a very specific accusation to, well, anything other than what the specific accusation were. I can't believe otherwise intelligent people fall for this nonsense.
NYT makes corrections. Your statement should actually read "people don't pay attention to corrections." It doesn't matter how many times a publication issues a correction because people will continue to spread the inaccurate information anyway.
For example, the Wakefield study that led to an entire anti-vaccination movement.
This is stupid. The NY Times, as a business, wasn't a subject of the article.
It's not a competition between a media company and a shipping company. It's a piece of journalism.
Either that journalism is accurate or it isn't. If it's wrong they should issue a correction, or review how it could be misleading or slanted and offer an alternate perspective. If it's correct they should stand by it.
In no event does the writing of a journalist, edited by an editor, have anything to do with the NY Times company as a business institution.
To claim otherwise is to buy into a frame that makes literally no sense here. I see why Fedex is doing it, it's apparently effective, even with the analytically sophisticated HN crowd. But this response is nonsense, it's almost a complete non-sequitur.
If I were the writer or editor of the story I'd tell Fedex to get bent. And if I were the publisher I'd patiently explain, yet again, the concept of independent journalism.
The FedEx statement seems like a classic example of corporate deception. It seems very carefully worded, probably by a team of attorneys, to be technically true but grossly misleading.
The tell is that FedEx calls the NYT article "factually incorrect" but never states exactly what assertions they dispute.
It's as if they want the reader and the media to infer that FedEx actually did pay taxes on billions in profit, or that FedEx actually did increase their investments as the phony rationale for the tax cut promised.
But since FedEx never actually says any of that, and instead just tries to infer it through clever wording, I'm going to trust NYT over this corporate snow job.
When FedEx twists the argument to accuse the NYT of also not increasing their capital investments, the whole thing reeks of Facebook's disinfo campaign to "deny and deflect" fundamentally factual reporting.
That is not a claim that was made. From the NYT article:
> As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019. Much of its savings have gone to reward shareholders: FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.
edit: Note: the parent commenter ninja-edited in the word "essentially" after I made this comment.
That framing is incredibly negative and obviously communicates it as "near zero" to the passing reader. Vague terminology of "less than projected" is the way they choose to frame it in the first sentence, and "spent even less in the next year" is the next sentence. NYT then chooses to completely omit the actual numerical figures of FedEx's investments, and instead highlights figures in the unrelated category of dividend payments (which were actually smaller than recent capital expenditures).
I'd say that paragraph you quoted showcases the misleading writing very nicely.
I get _capital investments are going down_ from that. I don't know how you are reading _near zero_ from it. It doesn't get more "passing reader" than me in this case, I know nothing about what happened here and I have zero interest in finding out.
FedEx's lobbying efforts argued reduced taxes would allow them to increase capital spending more than they would have otherwise. Instead, they look to have stuck to their trendline - and 2019's estimated is flat.
The NYT in the paragraph you quoted vaguely paints the picture that investment is being cut significantly in favor of massive dividend payments. However, if the reality is that it is merely plateauing as you and the parent comment show, then doesn't that show their wording was misleading?
Yes, FedEx didn't follow up with the massive new boosts they promised (besides the pension fund). However, the NYT should have included figures and stated it how you are in your comment - that growth factor is what has gone down, not the actual level of investment.
I am not disputing what you say about FedEx, I just want NYT to be more careful and precise in its reporting.
It makes the point that they didn't even spend what they'd initially projected, let alone increase it like they said they would. They did not follow through with their lobbying promises.
The fact that they instead increased stock buybacks etc. demonstrates a point of detractors of the tax law - that it's proceeds would most likely go back into already-wealthy pockets, not capital investment. It's not unreasonable to point it out here.
It's huge and runs right along side Interstate 70, you can see it from the other side of the airport just off of U.S. 40.
I can walk to my car, drive about 10 yards out of my work parking lot and see it across the airport. It's very real and almost certainly didn't grow out of the ground on its own accord.
FedEx makes capital expenditures every year. The NYT is not alleging they stopped them. They're alleging they didn't increase them any more than they normally would, despite saying that's why they needed tax reductions.
You're about the twentieth person on this thread to insist that the NYT article is "fake news" but not provide any specific assertions about what is wrong.
Adjusting depreciation schedules are very typical tax strategies for businesses. Hell, I've done this for a one-man shop making less than $100k in a year. Depreciation strategies are an important part of cash-flow management for capital-intensive industries. Otherwise, it's almost impossible to start a factory or other large industrial firm. Cash flow is marginal compared to capital, but the tax rate is proportional to capital. You can easily be put in a situation where the tax burden exceeds the free cash of the business.
I guess I'm not clear on what detail you think is missing. To me, their objections and actions are very clearly worded.
I believe they pointed out that they regularly pay taxes, that the tax rate for that year was due to accelerating depreciation, and the NYT is engaged in the same accounting strategies.
Accelerating depreciation has no net tax benefit over the full depreciation period. If the depreciation period is 10 years, but they accelerate in the first year, their net tax rate is the same over the 10 years as if they did not accelerate. They are simply moving their tax burden to the future.
They also took other current expenses to charge their pension, but again, these are expenses that they cannot take in the future - they will pay additional tax on future incomes. The net is the same.
Does it have no tax benefit assuming constant profits, or no tax benefit no matter what? Can you extract a net benefit by just accelerating some depreciation whenever you have a particularly profitable year?
It’s quite clear that some people’s model of taxes comes from doing Turbo Tax, year after year. Even Bernie Sanders does his own taxes. A man that wants to set the tax agenda on multinational corporations.
Just because a company pays zero taxes doesn’t mean that there was any thing fraudulent going on. If there’s zero taxes there’s probably incentives, depreciating assets as you described, losses carried forward, the corporate tax cut, employee stock compensation.
The problem is it isn't journalism, it's activism. People say corporate media is biased, but I think that falls short. It's not simply biased, it has an agenda. "Company follows tax laws" is not news. Whatever any individual company pays in taxes is not news unless there's criminal fraud of some sort. So it's completely fair to call them out in this way.
> The problem is it isn't journalism, it's activism.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Journalists have an ethical responsibility to be honest, but outside of that there's nothing to say that a journalist cannot have a set of beliefs that shape their worldview.
In this case you aren't really accusing the NYT of being dishonest, you're saying that their honest opinion isn't ok because you have a different opinion (or that a journalist has to be void of any opinions at all). I'd just suggest you skip either that author's work or the NYT in general then, and find something more aligned to your own worldview.
As to the accusation it is "activism?" I mean, yeah, I guess. Arguing that something, anything, is wrong is activism depending on your definitions but since we haven't established that activism is a bad thing or wrong, that's not really problematic in and of itself.
The difference between the NYT having an opinion and me having an opinion is that only the NYT is protected against lawsuits for libel with a special standard of “actual malice” by the contorted reasoning that anyone they chose to publish an article on must therefore be a public figure.
IANAL, but a good example of this is the coverage of the Covington High School students.
I think what the other poster was trying to say is that in the US defamation law treats public figures and non-public figures (and confusingly "limited purpose public figures") differently. The standard of "actual malice" applies to public figures only, the standard is lower for non-public figures. Which invites the question of "Is anyone the NYT writes about automatically a public figure?" Or even a limited purpose public figure?
IANAL so I don't know the answer, but I hope the answer is no. Since if the answer is yes it would allow a large media organization to thrust anyone into the spotlight and defame them without recourse as long as "actual malice" can't be established (ie the Covington High kids).
Of course activism isn't bad. I'm even sympathetic to the particular flavor of activism in this article. I welcome the NYT to publicly reclassify itself as an activist organization, instead of marketing itself as news, the paper of record even.
Journalism aspires to minimize bias, and that's why people trust journalism as an institution (and why, lately, that trust is rapidly eroding). Using "journalism" to give your biases/agenda the air of objectivity is misleading, immoral, and unethical. If a journalist or editor wants to push their personal agenda, they can use the opinion section like everyone else. That's why it exists.
The thrust of the NY Times piece was made clear in the first paragraph: FedEx isn't just following tax law, it's influencing it with a great deal of lobbying cash. It isn't a neutral player, but trying to rewrite the rules in its favor.
Okay. FedEx is subject to a law. They also have an opinion and try to influence the law they are subject to. Is there a significant percentage of the population that would assume otherwise? I'm still failing to see where this is "news" as opposed to "agenda."
FedEx made specific arguments in favor of the cut to shore up support. Those talking points turned out (surprise!) to be untrue. Taxpayers of the United States have subsequently lost out to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars.
I feel you're too caught up in whether or not you personally feel FedEx should pay more in taxes. That's not what is at issue here.
If NYT believes FedEx should pay more in taxes, if the NYT wants the law changed for any reason, I think that's fantastic. I welcome them to register as a PAC, subject themselves to the relevant regulations, give up their press passes, and fight for better tax law.
To me (and the NYT) it's not okay for CEOs to lie and deceive in order to get legislation passed. Especially legislation that enriches their shareholders while hurting the average American taxpayer.
The exact amount they pay is not the issue, and we're in agreement that no laws were broken.
The issue is one of morality not legality. They deserve to be called on their BS and they were.
Your favorite political activist/watchdog group is perfectly suited for that. But since you have no moral claim to FedEx's money, there's no news here. Maybe they changed their mind. Maybe they lied. Doesn't matter because you have no moral claim to that money.
>Maybe they lied. Doesn't matter because you have no moral claim to that money
We have a difference in morals. You claim to have no problem with FedEx lying in order to enrich itself at the expense of hardworking regular people. I do have a problem with it. The New York Times has a problem with it. And judging by this comment section, a lot of hard working Americans have a problem with it.
There's really nothing you can say to morally justify it, which is why you keep deflecting with the "fake news", and "biased reporting" angle. That's all you've brought to the discussion. Yet curiously, you've not been able to cite a single element of the article that is false or misleading.
You're trying to put me into a box where I don't belong. You are mind reading FedEx and mind reading me. You have no idea if they actually lied or simply changed their mind, or simply believe that what they did really is what leads to the best overall outcome for the public.
I'm not calling this fake news. I'm not suggesting it has any factual inaccuracies. I've offered what I feel is a reasonable delineation between straight news journalism and political propaganda. You just keep asserting you and others want to know this information without actually addressing what I'm saying.
If you disagree with me on where the line is between straight news journalism and political activism, that's fine. Can you please provide a general rule or set of rules that we can apply to all articles so that we can tell the difference between journalism and political activism?
>I'm still failing to see where this is "news" as opposed to "agenda."
It's right there.
>Can you please provide a general rule or set of rules that we can apply to all articles so that we can tell the difference between journalism and political activism
You made a claim that the article is "propaganda", "activism" and "agenda" (your words). So the onus would be on you to prove your claim. Or at least offer a coherent argument why you believe that. As far as I can tell, the only thing that makes this propaganda in your eyes is (a) it's from the NYT and (b) it opposes your worldview somehow.
Anyhow, I'm going to stop here with this particular thread.
You already revealed yourself when you stated you felt like you had a moral claim to something you have no legal claim to. That's fine, and a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. But by doing so, you have admitted that this is a matter of political ideology. You further accused me of merely having an opposing political bias to what is being conveyed in the article, doubling down on your own assertion that it is in fact about political propaganda. If it were just straight facts, then neither of our political biases would matter. Because if it were straight journalism it wouldn't be framed in such a way that your political leanings mattered.
Sigh. Again, with the changing of my words. It's really, really annoying.
I never said I felt a moral claim to the lost tax revenue. Ever. I've repeated over and over (and over) that it's the lying to the American people that I, and many others find morally repugnant. I don't know how to state it any clearer. I honestly don't. I've made no comments whatsoever of a political nature. Not one.
Is there something about disliking lying which is inherently political? I learned that lying was bad in kindergarten before I even knew what politics was.
You've already proven yourself to be arguing in bad faith with your "I'm not calling this fake news" lie (see directly above), so there's no point in continuing this conversation.
I guess liars defending liars is exactly what I should have expected.
Right, and you can find out what FedEx pays in taxes in their stock report. The difference between the stock report and what NYT is doing here is framing with a particular end goal in mind. They want to not just induce a reaction from the reader, but action towards a particular political end goal. There's nothing wrong with someone writing in that style, we just don't call it journalism. If the NYT wants to actively promote a particular political agenda, that's wonderful. They should register as a PAC, subject themselves to the relevant regulations, give up their press passes, and push for that agenda. I think they have a lot to offer us in that arena.
Economists: increasing shareholder value is investment.
Since you have no legal or moral claim to FedEx's money, there's no news here. Your favorite political activist/watchdog group is perfect for this kind of stuff. But it's not journalism. That's the part the really confuses me. I'm not suggesting this story isn't interesting, or perhaps even important. I'm just saying it's not straight news journalism. We have different legal bodies (PACs) which are well equipped to highlight information like this and get people riled up to vote certain ways, boycott companies, etc.
Why are you so hung up on this being considered straight news? How do you differentiate between straight news and political propaganda? I've offered my suggestion. Do a basic literary analysis. If it appears the goal of the author was to inspire particular political outcome, that's political propaganda. And I'm not using propaganda negatively here.
>Economists: increasing shareholder value is investment.
Why are you using sneaky word tricks? I said nothing about increasing shareholder value. I clearly said "shareholders' bottom line". Or put another way, return on investment.
Please don't do that.
> there's no news here
Hardworking Americans losing billions in tax revenue due to the misleading lobbying efforts of major corporations is news. Period. I can't fathom how it couldn't be news. In any other western-style democracy on the planet it would be news.
Now, you might have an issue with how it's reported. Or believe it was only reported to serve an agenda but you can't dispute the facts of what occurred. Except to say, elsewhere on this page that "it doesn't matter" if they lied.
So, you have no issue with what happened. Others find it morally repugnant and a violation of their trust. Therefore, news.
You continue to be concerned with whether or not they should pay more taxes, which is completely and totally irrelevant. Whether or not you consider yourself a stakeholder in some hypothetical lie which you've mind-read into this situation is totally irrelevant.
You've dodged my very direct question so I will put it to you again. What is the mechanism by which we, the public, should judge a piece of writing to be able to determine whether it is straight journalism or political activism? Where is the line? That is the only question that matters. This is a question of literary analysis of a piece of writing, not a fact check.
Why is the delivery more important to you than the facts? I find that very, very curious. In all honestly, it reads like you're desperately trying to change the topic.
For more, see my other comment. But I'm respectfully bowing out of this thread now.
It doesn't matter which is more important. Two things can be important. The distinction is important precisely for the reason why you think it might not be good for NYT to be legally considered a PAC instead of a newspaper. We have different regulations for different types of organizations. Which one you fall under matters. If it helps, Fox News is in the same boat as NYT here. They are both PACs pretending to be journalism.
I dunno. A person like me might think it since we live in a society, we should share the burden of keeping it going. So 'following tax law' effectively designed to be abused with built-in exemptions is news. It may not be criminal, but I can't say it is right.
edit to clarify: and if it is not right then it is of general interest to society and thus it is news
I don't identify as FedEx. I identify as a taxpayer who follows the law. You already admitted the law is intentionally written this way, so that they can pay less taxes. This isn't different from how the law was intentionally written so I can pay less taxes via the homestead exemption. There's no scandal here.
If NYT wants a law changed, they should acknowledge they are a tax advocacy group and not a news organization, and put forth arguments for changing the law. But what they're doing here is pushing a particular agenda under the guise of journalism. Real journalism doesn't have an agenda. Good journalism aims to minimize bias.
I may be reading it wrong, but you seem to misrepresent my argument.
Here is what I am saying. You are not Fedex. You are not even in the same category. It is not apples and oranges. It is apples and dwarf planets. Ergo, any attempt to compare your treatment is.. just not comparable. They are literally big enough to write laws that benefit them. That is news.
Here is what you appear to be saying. We are both tax payers so it is apples and apples comparison. I mean, I use my standard deduction and NYT does not write about me...
What is the same between FedEx and me is the lack of scandal. There is no scandal/news in a corporation following the tax law, just as there is no scandal/news in me following the tax law.
I want to be clear that my intention is not to debate tax law. I think that's irrelevant.
If the NYT wants the law to change in some way, I think that's fantastic. I welcome them to register as a PAC, subject themselves to the relevant regulations, give up their press passes, and fight for changes to the law. I think they'd be great at it, and I think they have a lot to offer the world in that arena.
Yes? But I did not classify it as scandal, but as news, or as as something of interest to the general populace. In the same vein, I did not discuss journalism as a whole.
I only said that it is news.
You seem to want to move discussion in a completely different direction.
I don't believe that NYT is trying to inform you about some obscure tax bill because it's interesting. It's no more interesting than my tax bill, or any other random corporation that happened to have a non-zero tax bill some year. The only reason it's interesting to you is because you have a particular political interest in this. That's perfectly legitimate for you to have that political interest. If they were just trying to inform you, they could inform you in a way that doesn't have any emotional framing. You could find it easily in their stock report or something. I believe NYT is trying to induce an emotional reaction in you for purely political reasons in order to influence the population towards a particular end goal. That is why they are acting like a PAC and not a newspaper.
News is not news if its purpose is a specific political outcome. The FedEx stock report, which also includes its tax bill, is news. I hope you can see the difference in purpose between the stock report and the article you just saw.
I see now. You alone are the arbiter what constitutes true news. Everything else propaganda aimed at specific outcome.
It may come as a surprise to you, but even your cherished Fedex stock report is a piece of propaganda aimed at specic audience ( investors ). It even has a singular political aim in mind.
I'm not the personal arbiter, I'm describing a reasonably objective measure of the difference between straight news journalism and political activism. This measure is available to anyone who understood basic literary analysis in high school, so it's available to almost everyone.
I welcome you to provide a different measure. In your opinion, where is the line? How could all observers reasonably differentiate between a piece of straight news journalism and political propaganda?
The original pamphleteers were largely activists. Thomas Paine et. al. People argue they were the prelude to journalists.
There's different kinds of bias/activism.
1. Publishing an opinion with facts (blog post/activism)
2. Publishing only the facts that support your political opinion without your political opinion.
3. Publishing all the facts but only while investigating the people you disagree with (not the people you agree with)
4. Investigating all the facts to settle publicly made allegations by politicians or political figures.
So while 1/2/3 might be seen as activism -- #4 is not. If people make the claim that the IRS is toothless when it comes to enforcement of tax collections on large corporations -- finding out the facts is a good way to help settle public debate.
Bias is largely unintentional. Your world view impacts how you interpret things and therefore which stories you find interesting or worth discussing. An agenda is different. An agenda is a conscious attempt to lead others to a particular end goal of your choosing. Perhaps you don't think that distinction is important, but I do. News will always be biased, but quality news does not have an agenda.
Here's a snippet of the public apology the NYT published after the 2016 election. Maybe with honesty, or without fear or favor means something different to you than it means to me.
>As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.
Moreover, the folks who cry "all news has bias!" to justify explicit propaganda miss the obvious point that bias isn't a binary proposition. A little bit of accidental bias is not the same as deliberately driving an agenda. Real journalism aspires to minimize bias.
1. Reporters and editors cannot possibly be aware of their own bias because they have their own world view, through which they perceive their own reality.
2. Because reporters and their editors cannot be aware of their own biases, fundamentally all news is biased, intentionally or unintentionally.
Your argument depends upon #1 to be True. However, people can know their biases and adjust for it. But at the NYT, editors and reporters are aware of their internal biases, so #1 is actually False.
So then #2 leads to something like #3:
3. Fox News, while intentionally biased, provides balance to the obvious left leaning bias of the NYT because of #1 and #2 -- even if they don't fully vet their stories [1].
So personally I would prefer to get my news from people that research and report facts. Facts, in and of themselves, are unbiased.
FedEx is a $40 billion company -- eight times the size of the NYT. They already have equal footing, and are responding right now, which is why we're reading about it. Only with zero specifics of what they claim the NYT is inaccurate on.
So... neither substantive nor particularly entertaining. :(
But the blog post does not specify how the original article is factually incorrect. So why should anyone pay attention to it? If there are specific errors, let Fedex point them out and ask for specific corrections.
They can take out ads in national newspapers if they want. Major companies and other institutions run full-page ads with “A letter to...” whenever they need to.
It’s not going to make a dent in their budget. Any notion that a $40B company somehow is unable to make itself heard is ludicrous. This isn’t a mom-and-pop operation.
EDIT: to replies claiming it's not the same or is blackmail because it requires FedEx to spend money to respond... you do realize that it costs the NYT over $300 million/yr to produce, distribute and market their news product? (Yes, the NYT spends money on ads to get more people to read its stuff, too.)
At a corporate level trying to reach millions of people, speech isn't free for anyone. Distribution costs money, for everyone. This isn't blackmail (sheesh), it's how public dialog between companies works period. And my original point stands: both sides are mega-companies that have plenty of money to promote whatever stories they want.
This is a ridiculous statement that completely ignores the social expectations of each company. People generally expect reporting media to report the truth unless they have some strong bias (like political), people expect fedex to deliver packages. Deviations from that result in demands that they "stay in [their] lane". A news story by NYT is going to have more impact than some company with a reputation for destroying packages.
Then FedEx has their PR team work with journalists at other major news sources to get their side out, which the journalists will be happy to do since it's genuinely newsworthy. (Which companies do every day, it's what PR teams are for.) Same thing in the end.
I will say it one more time: the idea that FedEx, a $40B company, is somehow, in any way, disadvantaged in being able to respond, simply defies credulity.
And NYT can say it is big corporate paid advocacy and the FedEx brand will taint it. My point is one brand is seen as more trustworthy in this space, and perhaps in general. You're also assuming that media companies are strictly competitive and dont align on perceived truths
NYT is spending money to publish this article... that would explains why they are all going to bankrupt /s
NYT sure is spending money, but it is ultimately making money by publishing this article, or else they woudldn't do it. They are making more money by making it more sensational.
FedEx would spends money to responds, ironically, they would have to spends it most probably to NYT. NYT will again spends money to publish that full page ads, sure, but they are making money by publishing it, or else they wouldn't do it either.
They aren't on equal footing. NYT makes money with that article.
Do we need to be present in person to exchange ideas? Start the "debate" any time you want, Freddie, just by including any facts or substance whatsoever in your statement! Clearly more of a tantrum. Totally reminds me of "Meet me after school for a fight!"
It's an interesting example of the recent shift in public discourse from being focused on truth to being focused on power.
All speech has both subjective emotive content ("power") and objective factual content ("truth"), and the interplay between them is part of what makes speech effective. In times of hegemony, though, the "power" content of speech is downplayed. Power relations within society are taken for granted, and it's pointless to challenge them, because the best case is that your words will be discounted as crazy and the worst case is that that power will be exercised against you, potentially with life-ending consequences. Think about speaking out against a totalitarian government, or being a communist during the McCarthy era.
In times of multipolarity, the "truth" aspect of speech is downplayed, and discourse is all about power. Think of nationalism in the 1870s, or yellow journalism in the early 1900s (right as British hegemony was collapsing into the multipolar world that led up to WW1). Papers would publish plenty of stories that simply weren't true, but the point wasn't truth: it was to boost their circulation numbers and amass more power and influence in a world that was rapidly collapsing into a system of warring powers.
Trump, SJWs, white nationalists, MRAs, cryptocurrency advocates, anti-vaxxers, Russian cyber-trolls, and Democratic Socialists are all other instances of this phenomena: they are small splinter groups vying for mindshare because they see that the existing power structure is collapsing and will leave behind a vacuum, and they all distort the "truth" (which was always distorted before by power relations, but not to this extent) in a bid to gain more followers. Some corporations are catching on, and this FedEx statement is an example of this: note that they posted it as an open letter, on their own company blog, rather than as a press release. They don't care whether the NYTimes actually accepts their debate or not, they want to make the public statement to undermine the legitimacy of the NYTimes as a source of truth itself.
This is a well written comment, and I saw that because I’m finding it difficult to disagree with what’s written here. This comment is also heavily downvoted, at least when I was replying.
Im open to hearing an alternative argument instead of just folks downvoting. What do you think is inaccurate or misleading here?
> It's an interesting example of the recent shift in public discourse from being focused on truth to being focused on power.
I'd go farther and say that it is disheartening. It also seems to be completely aligned with the post-modernist way of evaluating/describing the world.
> I'd go farther and say that it is disheartening. It also seems to be completely aligned with the post-modernist way of evaluating/describing the world.
Nothing to do with post modernism, it's a version of Marxism that is compatible with capitalism. Post modernists can't be ideologues by definition. Intersectionality is very much an ideology. People who believe that don't ask question, they do finger pointing and public shaming to try to change and control public discourse. It's very reminiscent of the soviet union era, except it doesn't come from the state but a group of people that hold a certain power of influence, ironically.
Labels and definitions are hard to agree on but whatever you call it, the stew of identity-politics, marxism, socialism, post-modernism, intersectionality, and so on that seems to be taking hold on the progressive-left is pretty toxic, IMHO.
The writing of a journalist employed by the NYT, edited by an editor employed by the NYT, for publication in a newspaper sold by the NYT for profit is every bit as much a commercial activity as FedEx delivering packages. In this case the NYT has a target market that is reflexively skeptical of businesses and commercial activity so it is useful for them to obscure what they are doing. The fact remains that the NYT is a business primarily focused on seeking profit, no different from FedEx. Right now they are in the business of throwing stones at other businesses; it’s perfectly appropriate to respond to that by pointing out that the NYT lives in a glass house.
>the NYT is a business primarily focused on seeking profit, no different from FedEx
That is incorrect, albeit precisely what FedEx (and many other subjects of investigative journalism) would like us to believe.
When "all news is fake news" becomes widespread public perception, that public is doomed to authoritarian rule, most likely by leaders backed by the business elite.
But that's a strawman argument. By artificially setting the bar that high for entities like the NYT to be allowed to publish stories like that you make it impossible to publish any journalistic piece at all. And that higj bar allows everybody else to just past everything underneath it. A slippery slope if you ask me.
Not arguing with that. The thing with free speech so is to be aware of the consequences for society if the public discurs becomes based on opinions, distrust and partisanship instead of civility and facts.
Or, that seeking profit isn't inherently evil? Maybe it's working as designed? Poor journalism will suffer profits (at least we hope). Good journalism will attract more profits.
That’s also a straw man, since literally no one is making that statement.
The point of contention is whether after arguing that a tax cut was needed to do capital investment, did the savings from the tax cut actually go to capital investment, or merely financial trickery of stock buy backs as the critics of the tax cut predicted.
There are many more media companies, employing far worse in the standards of journalism, making more money. Even if you can make an argument that their standards have slipped they still aren't Buzzfeed.
I think it's intensely incorrect and that journalism is an asset to society that definitely is deserving of public subsidies - but given the environment NYT is operating in they're either going to need to seek a profit or a patron. I think it's pretty obvious the sort of PR fallout the Washington Post has (somewhat deservedly) gotten after being taken over by Bezos.
There’s no silver bullet in any of this. If the government subsidies journalism the government can control journalism. At least with corporate control you can have competing corporations telling alternate sides of the story. But ultimately it’s on the public to be skeptical and critical consumers of media.
I agree that both are corruptible, but I'd rather see some heavily subsidized government friendly news sources that then receive competition from private corporations (similar to the british or canadian model with the bbc and cbc respectively) rather than rely wholly on corporate backed news sources... NPR and PBS are alright I guess, but their budgets have been slashed several times over and while there is good journalism (like the Newshour) there isn't the budget to cover stories in as in depth a manner.
I'd also like to highlight that as much as people fear government control of subsidized news sources - both PBS and NPR have been quite decently independent, with PBS in particular not having qualms about investigating the government when warranted.
They create an "obstacle" to cancelling your subscription. The "obstacle" is you have to make phone call and talk to one of their agents who will try to keep you as a subscriber by offering a discount on the subscription.
It's a good way to extend your introductory payment plan (or close to it).
You can still cancel, of course, just be firm and say so. Not a big deal.
You can still cancel, of course, just be firm and say so. Not a big deal.
You don't even need to be firm or argue. I've had to cancel my NYT subscription several times over the years. Sometimes I moved to a place where delivery wasn't available. Others because I was between jobs. The people on the phone are very polite and professional. They will offer you discounts, but they won't ever give you a hard sell. At least in my experience.
Yeah, it's a dark user pattern, but there's a long way to go for them to match the tactics of Comcast or Verizon. I would call it unfair to characterize NYT subscriptions with Cable-TV-like tactics.
Do they offer intractably complex subscriptions meant to deceive you into buy more than what you need ? No.
Do they prey on old people and talk them into services they neither use nor understand? No.
Do they call you on a regular basis to nag you about an upgrade to your subscription? No.
Do they send you mail 1-2 times a month with one of those stupid credit-card-sized cardboard ads with a deal on them? No.
Do they automatically jack-up your bill as soon as intro is over? Yes. That's about as close as they get to cable TV. It's not good, but it's not evil either. You can, AFAIK, extend a discount indefinitely by calling them up and asking for it.
Disregarding a lot of the other shade thrown at NYT in this comment section - forcing people into a phone call is definitely a dark user pattern. You're making it trivial for people to start giving you money while raising the barrier for them to stop giving you money - that's a trap that'll retain some subscriptions for no reason other than low effort and super slimy.
as much as i appreciate their reporting, i won't (re-)subscribe to nytimes because of this dark pattern. let me cancel the same easy way i subscribed, online, or i won't ever subscribe again.
The NYT is a public corporation. About 1/6 of it is owned by Carlos Slim, a billionaire member of the “business elite”.
Does the NYT deliver higher quality reporting than Alex Jones? Yes, of course they do, but they are neither perfect nor omniscient nor unbiased nor purely virtuous in their motivations.
Let’s turn this around, shall we? When the public implicitly trusts media corporations that are operated for profit and owned by billionaires, they are doomed to authoritarian rule, most likely by leaders backed by the business elite that owns and operates these media corporations in the first place.
Implicit trust of any institution is a shortcut to authoritarian rule. And every authoritarian justifies themselves by accusing others of being a greater threat. The only proper attitude for a free people is to distrust and resist any institution that holds or seeks power, and that includes the mainstream press.
> When the public implicitly trusts media corporations that are operated for profit and owned by billionaires
That's something that has literally never been the case. Skepticism exists on a sliding scale, and children are taught in high school how to spot a biased headline, a poor use of a statistic, and so on.
When it comes to the public's attitude toward the press, it's not credulousness versus skepticism that exists, it's healthy skepticism versus cynicism.
There was a mercifully brief period in this country’s history where most people unquestioningly accepted whatever Walter Cronkite told them. The mainstream media is terrified by the gradual erosion of this power and is desperately trying to convince everyone that it’s better for society at large for them to hold that level of implicit public trust. This is even more true for newspapers, which have always considered themselves of higher status than television anyway.
To wit, I don’t characterize as “healthy skepticism” the propagation of the outright lie, in this very thread, that the NYT is not a business.
> There was a mercifully brief period in this country’s history where most people unquestioningly accepted whatever Walter Cronkite told them.
You know, it's before my time, but when Cronkite suggested in 1968 that the United States withdraw from Vietnam, I believe what he said was taken seriously. I do not believe it resulted in the country unifying behind the peace movement and immediately withdrawing from Vietnam, which is the sort thing that would happen if "most people unquestioningly accepted whatever Walter Cronkite told them."
> The mainstream media is terrified by the gradual erosion of this power and is desperately trying to convince everyone that it’s better for society at large for them to hold that level of implicit public trust. This is even more true for newspapers, which have always considered themselves of higher status than television anyway.
The less hyperbolic and more accurate way to state all this is, they believe their work is important and something the public should take seriously. Those monsters.
> You know, it's before my time, but when Cronkite suggested in 1968 that the United States withdraw from Vietnam, I believe what he said was taken seriously. I do not believe it resulted in the country unifying behind the peace movement and immediately withdrawing from Vietnam, which is the sort thing that would happen if "most people unquestioningly accepted whatever Walter Cronkite told them."
It took a few years, but the ultimate outcome of the Vietnam War was probably sealed at that moment, and everybody including President Johnson and Walter Cronkite himself knew it.
More essential though was the unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream media's power to selectively report the facts they considered most pertinent, to decide the issues of the day by choosing what to report and what not to report, and to establish governing narratives around their coverage. There is an enormous degree of power that the media can and does exercise in this fashion. Today that power is much less centralized than it once was. I consider this a net good, and am suspicious of any nostalgia for the days of greater centralization.
> The less hyperbolic and more accurate way to state all this is, they believe their work is important and something the public should take seriously.
I take the work of the media seriously enough to be critical towards it rather than abiding by lies about how media corporations aren't actually corporations.
That's actually not something I argued, although I understand there's a subthread or something about it.
> More essential though was the unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream media's power to selectively report the facts they considered most pertinent, to decide the issues of the day by choosing what to report and what not to report, and to establish governing narratives around their coverage. There is an enormous degree of power that the media can and does exercise in this fashion. Today that power is much less centralized than it once was. I consider this a net good, and am suspicious of any nostalgia for the days of greater centralization.
I'm not sure how much I actually agree or disagree because you're being so blatantly hyperbolic ("unquestioning acceptance," etc.) about things that frankly aren't key to what I believe is the interesting point.
Decentralization and news apart from the mainstream media seems like it should be be a great benefit. Like them or not, it was never a good situation that GE owned NBC, one family owned the Washington Post, or whatever. The trouble is, one thing that has not happened has been greater empowerment of small newspapers and local journalists who are best positioned to serve their communities. They're simply being driven out of business by large companies.
On the other hand, "mainstream media" is often just code for non-conservative media, whatever exists outside of Fox, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and assorted AM radio garbage. If that's how you look at things, the "mainstream media" is definitely losing some market share and mindshare.
> It took a few years, but the ultimate outcome of the Vietnam War was probably sealed at that moment, and everybody including President Johnson and Walter Cronkite himself knew it.
Johnson made a comment to the effect that he'd just lost the war, but when it came to war fighting, Johnson was honestly quite an idiot. The ultimate outcome of the war had many more years to be determined and a lot of other people had their say, including, you know, the enemy.
I don't think the fact that NYT seeks a profit necessarily means that they don't maintain a level of journalistic integrity though. Obviously how much we trust NYT (or any other media outlet) is a personal value judgement, but I would be wary of conflating profit with motives (in this case promoting click-bate journalism which is misleading).
It's naive to think the NY Times as an entity is not ultimately responsible for all writing its journalists do. Management hires journalists whose agenda and ideals match their own. Management sets the editorial vision both explicitly and implicitly. This is how all media organizations work.
It's completely legitimate to hold NY Times management accountable here.
The NYT is a business supported by employing authors to write articles and sell advertisements to people who want to read those articles. To claim that NYT as a business has nothing at all to do with it's product, that it payed to create, curate and publish is clearly nonsense.
We all know that one can make statements that while factually correct, can be misleading, distorting, or unsound in some other way. (e.g. The statement "the divorce rate is highly correlated to the per capita consumption of margarine" is factually true [1] - but left on its own might leave people with the impression one has to do with the other)
The same is true here - leaving out the context that FedEx has spent ~$50b on capex in the past 10 years and recognized $8.2b of income tax expense in the same 10 year period (which is not all US fedral, and might not have been the amount remitted over that period) changes the tone of the story. Additionally, really all that is happening is that tax collections go down a bunch in one year and up for the following six years, the only gain is on time value of money)
> Either that journalism is accurate or it isn't. If it's wrong they should issue a correction, or review how it could be misleading or slanted and offer an alternate perspective. If it's correct they should stand by it.
Why should a response or dialogue have to be in print? And why should a company's defense be limited to asynchronous communication? Debate is an accepted and effective dispute resolution framework, especially in areas where truth or fairness may be nuanced and is far from black and white. (Tax policy is a perfect example that is both nebulous and politically charged.)
As arbiters and outers of wrongdoing, journalists play a critical role in speaking truth to power and holding parties to account. This does not absolve them from publicly defending their positions, or being challenged on them, however. FedEx is well within their rights in responding in whatever manner they see fit, same as NYT can agree or reject the challenge.
Debate certainly ups the ante for all involved and is an interesting escalation tactic in the current media landscape.
Wow, let's get more debates between various institutions, not sure why we don't have more to begin with.
For instance, why is it that the Democratic and GOP primaries never crossed paths? Shouldn't they have organized some R vs D debates before the final two candidates? Or what about FCC vs net neutrality advocates? Kaepernick vs Police Chief? I can think of lots of interesting pairings that will sadly never happen.
I would be interesting in opening up debates like those you mentioned. The hard part would be attracting the average person and not just people with extreme or conspiracy-theorists views
Doesn't respond to any of the claims in the story. The story is about 1) how FedEx lobbied for the Trump tax cuts, 2) what they claimed they would do with that money if the tax cuts were passed, 3) what they actually did with that money and 4) what the implications are for the efficacy of the Trump tax cuts in general.
If the New York Times corporation followed exactly the same playbook as FedEx with regard to lobbying, how would that change any of the four points above? And what would Arthur Sulzbergers opinions about tax cuts have to do with the reporting of the story?
It's an extremely blatant and I thought transparent attempt to change the subject, but, if the first fifteen comments here are any indication, a surprisingly effective one.
Corporate taxes shouldn't exist, especially in their current form. Corporate taxes are just reflected to consumers as higher prices or to workers as lower wages. In the current structure, corporate taxes benefit large businesses more with large legal departments because they can afford to take advantage of deductions etc.
Corporate taxes should be replaced by an increase in capital gains tax.
> Corporate taxes are just reflected to consumers as higher prices or to workers as lower wages.
The United States has had a corporate income tax since 1909, but in all the years since there is a major question about it that economists haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily: who pays it? [...] Probably most people assume that the corporate income tax is largely paid by consumers of its products or services. That is, they assume that although the tax is nominally levied on the corporation as a whole, in fact the burden of the tax is shifted onto customers in the form of higher prices.
All economists reject that idea. [...] That leaves two remaining groups that may bear the burden of the corporate tax: workers and shareholders. [...] Most economists now agree that the burden of the corporate income tax falls on labor to some extent, but there is disagreement over the degree. [...] People should be aware that even the best academic economists disagree on the basics of who actually pays the corporate tax.
No matter which role you allocate the cost of the tax to, in the end it's us who are paying the bill. Even if you're one of those rare individuals without investments of your own, you still benefit from them. Punishing the shareholders who provide the capital to produce goods more efficiently isn't going to make the goods you consume any cheaper.
Who reaps the benefits of government investment into public infrastructure and the common good that these taxes make possible? We do.
In fact, since there are many consumers of US products (and shareholders in US companies) who are not resident or citizens of the US then it seems we win more if we raise those corporate taxes. If the shareholder's don't like this deal I suggest they sell.
The "benefit" of having government decide how to invest that money, as opposed to those who earned it, is strictly negative. All other considerations aside, the moral cost of endorsing the use of force in this manner outweighs any possible material benefit.
Using corporate taxes to shift the burden onto foreigners, as you've suggested, is at best a short-term tactic. The other countries would just enact reciprocal policies and we'd be back where we started, except with less international trade and poorer diplomatic relations. Isolationism is not a recipe for domestic economic bliss.
> Companies that make up the S&P 500 index had an average effective tax rate of 18.1 percent in 2018, down from 25.9 percent in 2016, according to an analysis of securities filings. More than 200 of those companies saw their effective tax rates fall by 10 points or more. Nearly three dozen, including FedEx, saw their tax rates fall to zero or reported that tax authorities owed them money.
> From the first quarter of 2018, when the law fully took effect, companies have spent nearly three times as much on additional dividends and stock buybacks, which boost a company’s stock price and market value, than on increased investment.
This is concrete, relevant data (unlike the argument made by the FedEx CEO, as others have already mentioned). I'm curious if anyone in the pro-Fedex crowd can provide evidence to the contrary.
The increasing share of wealth that is moving from the bottom 90% into the hands of the top 1% in the US is a real concern to me. And I suspect a big part of that has to do with the recent trend of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which benefits shareholders and not workers. How many people in the bottom 50% (or even 90%) actually own a significant amount of stock, do you think?
The first source I found on this topic states: [1]
In 2016, American households headed by someone aged 32-61 averaged $120,809.40 in retirement savings, or $264,453.30 using an expansive calculation. Using the same calculations and definitions, American households have a median of $7,800 and $17,000 saved, respectively.
Investors have stock. Dividends and stock buybacks move idle cash out of the corporation and back into the hands of investors. Investors now have cash instead of stock. Those investors are better at distributing cash to good investments than Fedex or Apple or Google is. The cash doesn't get redistributed from the non-1% to the 1%. The idle cash that corporations have aren't generating jobs.
> The idle cash that corporations have aren't generating jobs.
But that contradicts the claimed raison d'être for the 2018 tax cut: that corporate direct investment was being restrained by corporate income taxes.
A call to lower corporate income taxes so more money could flow to investors would have been consistent, both with economic orthodoxy and with the observed outcome.
I'm thinking lower taxes reduces the amount of money going to the government is good. The government is horribly inefficient due things such as bureaucracy, corruption, etc. No matter where they operate, it hasn't been good. Whether it's US or China, the gov't is not where I think money should go.
>No matter where they operate, it hasn't been good.
That's what the rich hand powerful want you to think. But the facts don't support it. Look at any of the other top western democracies. You know, the ones with longer lifespans, more upward mobility, happier populations, better infrastructure, better education, and so on.
I'm not suggesting that those countries are perfect or that there aren't gross inefficiencies, but the widespread belief that good government is basically impossible, so why even try is mostly an American (right wing) phenomenon.
Other top-tier western style democracies, despite their many imperfections, are doing just fine.
Western societies have been more democratic... and more capitalist. If you take high taxes to the extreme (eg. eliminate all billionaires like Bernie Sanders recommends), you get closer to communism which hasn't done as well.
We were having a tax discussion. We both agree that gov't has gross inefficiencies, so I'm suggesting funding the inefficient organization less. When I said "it hasn't been good" I was talking in the context about efficiency.
In my next comment, I again was talking about taxes. I used communism as an example of a high tax system. I also wanted to point out that western style democracies which you call good, lean toward capitalism, where gov't have a smaller role in society - which I am using to support my lower tax argument.
>If you take high taxes to the extreme (eg. eliminate all billionaires like Bernie Sanders recommends), you get closer to communism which hasn't done as well.
At the height of the American war effort, the top tax bracket exceeded 90% of individual income[1] this dramatically decreased inequality and established the modern middle class. It was also arguably the most stable and prosperous time for families, with most able to sustain with a single-income earner.
Bernie Sanders suggests that we respond to the ongoing climate crisis with a similar level of world-war scale effort with the hopes of averting even worse, more destabilizing effects.
>I'm curious if anyone in the pro-Fedex crowd can provide evidence to the contrary
I'm not sure I'm "pro-Fedex", but:
"stock buybacks, which boost a company’s stock price and market value"
Stock buybacks do not increase the company's market value. Cash goes out, stock comes in. Balance sheet is the same.
My second point would be: is 2 years long enough to determine the effects of the tax cut? Companies the size of Fedex can't make massive changes to budgets overnight.
Market value of public companies is not determined by the balance sheet but by the stock price multiplied by the number of share. Buybacks reduce the number of shares and by increasing demand increase the price per share.
In the first step, the market value is a constant, taking out the number of shares thus increases directly the share price. Which are than further increased by increased demand and increasing the market value as now the number of shares is constant.
So yes, buy backs directly increase the market value. Why else would companies do them? They also have the nice side effect of increasing the value of execs' stock options, again a nice motivation for a CEO to do a buyback.
Buybacks are routinely priced above the list prise to ensure sales. Once the buyback occurs, the only change in corporate value should reflect the improved financial fundamentals of the company.
The NYT piece seems to be a great example of factual statements not telling the full story. I'm a NYT subscriber and value their reporting, but I think they fell short here. It's easy to get a sense from the article that tax reform simply saved FedEx about $1.5 billion (the amount they owed the previous year). But it's more complicated than that.
Yes, tax reform helped FedEx lower their tax bill. But a huge chunk of that was due to temporary behavior changes FedEx made in response to the bill - not a permanent reduction in how much they will owe each year. One of the ways they saved a lot of money was investing a lot into assets for which they could deduct 100% of future depreciation immediately. This is a temporary part of tax reform. They would have been able to deduct that value eventually anyway, just over a long period of time.
They could go into a lot more detail about exactly which provisions of tax reform helped FedEx, and how.
They did not explain the 100% deduction for asset depreciation, or the fact that it's only a temporary provision of the law. They merely included a brief statement from FedEx referencing this provision in sort of generic terms.
They also mentioned very briefly that a large part of the reduced tax bill was FedEx's pension contribution, but didn't provide any additional details about how tax reform encouraged this behavior.
They also include misleading statements like this:
> “Something like $1.5 billion in future taxes that they had promised to pay, just vanished,” said Matthew Gardner, an analyst at the liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington.
The idea that FedEx had "promised" to pay that money is just ridiculous.
Why is everyone on this thread running to rescue NYT? Most of what NYT does in the last 10 years as far as I remember is crony-corporatism and warmongering. And occasionally support social liberal causes to deceive people.
Agreed. They also post continuous anti-tech coverage. They are definitely yellow journalism at this point and I wish they'd stop being voted to the front-page of HN as if they're an impartial source.
I'm much, much more concerned about The New York Times deceptively pushing a political agenda during an election year than I am about FedEx legally paying as few taxes as possible. We all do that every tax season!
It seems like the real story is how the NYT is actively campaigning for the DNC and I'm glad FedEx is calling them out.
Here lies the problem. One's tax burden should not be determined by your cleverness to dodge them, but some inarguable, tangible value. Like a bill.
The tax law holes that allow for "creative" corporate financial "solutions" (like moving HQ to Ireland) and their ilk should be patched with dramatically simpler tax law.
The government should simply bill people and corporations for their tax, outright, like they do in many other countries.
I think it would be great if the tax was straightforward and simple and what it was going to be spent on was also clearly defined as part of the "bill". As it stands today, neither side of that equation is in any way simple or transparent.
That being said, it's a non-story that people will use all the laws available to them to lower their taxes. They are after all the actual tax law and not "holes", as tempting as it is to label them that.
NYT has been publishing articles about big corporations evading taxes for many years, including during the Obama administration. This is not new, and it's part of the NYT's social agenda, not the election year.
I wonder if it really is a "social" agenda vs. something else. They clearly do have some sort of agenda though, and while they no doubt always publish articles through that lens, I'd say they crank it up on election years, especially post-Trump.
So they lay out what the discussion should be about :
The focus of the debate should be federal tax policy and the relative societal benefits of business investments and the enormous intended benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners.
I would love to see this debate. I don’t trust the media, and I don’t really trust corporations, so I’m not sure who to believe here. A public debate would go along way towards bringing transparency an open discussion. Those are not bad things.
320 comments
[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 628 ms ] threadTake a lesson, OP, list specific verifiable arguments instead of ad hominem "yeah those guys suck as usual".
The 2020 narrative for the Democratic Party is again wealth envy and how all the woes can be solved if X just pays their fair share. The easy villains are billionaires and large well known companies. After all it is damn easy to make numbers appear however you want; see the recent claim Amtrak might make a profit which is only true if you don't look hard.
we are already deep into the election cycle for the next President and Congress so you must use a heavy filter on stories you read on the NYT and even here. you can pretty much toss any story that gets around to mentioning one candidate or another.
If the federal government is past its prime, what do you think that the future of the United States should look like?
Not the OP but this is absolutely how I feel. I think I would only be happy to pay taxes if every single dollar I spent was accounted for with a way to track progress on what is being funded. Missing milestones or goals would result in me paying no more taxes on that project until whatever management in place was restructured.
Anything not dealing with politics is pretty decent, but nearly everything they print now has to have some political slant or cheap shot at the current administration.
I remember reading a recent article about the drought in California. Pretty well written article, but of course about midway through the article there were two paragraphs highlighting Trump's opinion that climate change isn't real, blah blah blah. Even though the whole mess has been a direct result of the state government completely mismanaging their own resources.
It's no wonder most people on the right just completely discount them now as a reliable new source. It wasn't always the case, but from the time of the beginning of the 2016 election to now, it's all been downhill.
The critique of the tax cut also didn't make a lot of sense.
It's just a poor story - it's unclear what it's objective is.
> The public face of its lobbying effort, which included a tax proposal of its own, was FedEx’s founder and chief executive, Frederick Smith, who repeatedly took to the airwaves to champion the power of tax cuts. “If you make the United States a better place to invest, there is no question in my mind that we would see a renaissance of capital investment,” he said on an August 2017 radio show hosted by Larry Kudlow, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council.
FedEx lobbied for these cuts, and argued they'd invest more capital if they were made reality. They got what they wanted, and didn't do what they said.
The NYT wasn't lobbying in this fashion.
That seems to work.
E.g., how does the fact that the NYTimes paid no federal income tax in 2017 address or refute anything in the article?
Likewise the other financial facts about the NYTimes doesn't seem related.
The times article is about how the tax cuts did not result in the capital investments promised, by FexEx and others.
Now, if the times had lobbied for the tax cut and likewise claimed capital gains investments would increase but then they didn't, that would be relevant.
Drive by IND on 70, you can see the capital investment that was one of the promises of this. Hub expansion via construction (similar construction at MEM). The construction at IND is so large you can actually see it from the other side of the airport, I know because I see it every weekday when I pull into the parking lot at work.
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2018/01/26/fedex-credits...
800,000 sqft expansion at IND alone
https://bgabuilders.com/fedex-indianapolis-ob4-project/
The New York Times building has twice as much square footage than the claimed 800,000 square feet that FedEx added.
So you can kind of see where I'm going. Although it's stupid to argue that a newspaper can't write an article about something if they haven't invested as much money in real estate as the subject of their article... it appears that they have, so as dumb as that argument is, it's not even correct.
They didn't 'add some square footage to a warehouse" they are building multiple brand new buildings, with brand new equipment, drastically increasing their sort operation at IND by 800,000 square feet and are also expanding at MEM as well as building a brand new facility just south of Indianapolis.
Buying a building /= building a new state of the art sort facility full of conveyors, scanners, etc.
From the article:
> ...As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019.
So maybe you can argue that the times numbers are bad with some numbers of your own? Maybe you can argue with some numbers that this hub expansion is just getting started and over the next few years will represent a nice increase in capital spending? As it is, you aren't really arguing anything.
I'm also not FedEx and am replying to a specific comment, that I quoted, in this thread and not the article. The construction is active, it has been active for over a year now.
The IndyStar article also links to another article, with yet more construction, going on just south of Indianapolis at 259 million dollars.
The comment I replied to stated
>did not result in the capital investments promised
I linked to one example, and referenced a second, of them actively carrying out those capital investments.
They are not disputing those numbers at all.
What they want to do is "The focus of the debate should be federal tax policy and the relative societal benefits of business investments and the enormous intended benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners."
Bet seeing those numbers (2017 Tax bill: $1,500,000,000, 2018 tax bill: $0) must have stung and Fedex is frantically trying to change the topic of conversation.
NYT should put out an article criticizing themselves AND FedEx, maybe they're both shitty but doesn't excuse one or the other.
While perhaps the NYT's story was 'correct', it neglected to point out that other companies also took advantage of this fact and that indeed this was the purpose of the tax reform. Instead, it sounds like the NYT made Fedex into some kind of bogeyman attempting to avoid taxes, instead of telling the full story, which is that, by American government policy, the government of the United States of America decided to offer businesses a way to significantly reduce their federal tax bill by investing their money into capital assets.
This is a much less sinister sounding headline, which is likely why the NYT neglected to publish it.
It's like if the government passed a bill to reward families that have children in the next five years with 10k USD each, and, instead of reporting on this bill in general, the new york times decided to only report on why bob and sally had four kids in those five years to milk the government of money. It's dishonest reporting, which is unsurprising coming from the new york times.
So if expected behavior of the NYT is factual reporting, I'd say they're on the money!
Edit: Can someone downvoting point out where I'm wrong? They say the NYTimes distorted the truth, but give no indication of how.
This isn't that. Fedex is saying that they do a lot more for the national economy that the NYT. They pay more in taxes, they invest more in assets, etc.
Proof: your downvotes.
Here's one point of view that doesn't come up as often as it should: the First Amendment doesn't say anything about churches that it doesn't also say about the press. Yet we don't tax churches on the grounds that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." [1]
If it weren't for this double standard, the Times would indeed be justified in paying zero tax.
[1]: http://www.catholic365.com/article/1992/faith-of-our-fathers...
It assuredly does say different things:
>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If a newspaper didn't want to pay taxes they can form themselves as a non profit as churches largely do. It's been done before, e.g. ProPublica, Institute for Non-profit News, Crosscut, The Texas Tribune, and many more.
In reality, the language in the First Amendment is nowhere near sufficient to justify granting tax exemptions to an entire industry, be it religious or secular.
Journalism provides information, without which voters are unable to make decisions any better than random chance. Democracy cannot function in the absence of information.
Here, specifically, the NYT is contributing to the public's knowledge of the effects of the tax cut: people were promised expanding businesses investments as an outcome of letting them keep all those billions. This not happening should inform peoples' willingness to try that strategy again.
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
> In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing.
> Its financial filings show it owed no taxes in the 2018 fiscal year overall. Company officials said FedEx paid $2 billion in total federal income taxes over the past 10 years.
So in the last 10 years FedEx paid $2B in taxes, of which $1.5B was paid in 2017. That seems really weird. Does anyone know enough about their financials to explain how this happened?
http://s1.q4cdn.com/714383399/files/doc_financials/annual/20...
I'm assuming the $2B is about payroll taxes, their share of federal income tax for W2 employees. All companies with these type of employees pay some of these (along with SS and workman's comp, etc.)
There is another question of corporate taxes. Corporate taxes work different than individual taxes. For individuals we: EARN > PAY TAKES > SPEND. However, for corporations they: EARN > SPEND > PAY TAXES. This means that all companies can choose to pay no corporate taxes ever. This is purposeful and the intent of the tax code is to encourage reinvestment and expansion and capital expenditures like new equipment because this keeps more people employed long term. This is always why people don't understand when company X paid $0 in corporate taxes. It is a choice. It should be expected from someone like Amazon who re-invests so heavily.
Now if a company wants to have cash on hand or do stock buybacks, they they must realize this money and pay taxes on it. The new tax laws made this a much much more attractive proposition. The "promise" was that this would be spent on expansion however most was spent on stock buybacks which is a large driver of the stock market up in the last year despite interest rates around zero and rapidly slowing growth. It seems to me that this is the jist of the NYT article. The $0 is just to grab headlines. Lots of companies lobbied for these cuts for "expansion" but none of them did. They took the opportunity to leverage it against stock price which makes sense for the C suite since that is a major part of their compensation. This is another reason that board members, C suite and VPs of public companies should not be paid in stocks or options or RSUs.
Update: I realized I didn't write the second half of my sentence... which makes me sound like a corporate shill.
The second half is... AND someone on the other side can immediately call bullshit on their spin, but we can have a proper debate on the inadequacy of current Federal tax policy.
eighty thousand plus pages of tax laws aren't meant to be simply to understand nor do the outcomes always make sense. the NYT would better serve the public showing just how abusive the tax law is because it mostly it is a political tool for calling in favors and punishing those who don't play ball besides being a revenue tool.
Two examples: T.H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, and a round-table I once attended with Dijkstra and Larry Loucks of IBM, along with a couple of other professors who were completely outclassed by those two. EWD was slow and very precise, it was clear that he was thinking deeply about the topics, but he didn't actually say much in the time alloted; Larry was fast, facile, and rather shallow, he was of the IBM style (he who talks loudest is in charge).
We’ve seen this many times before. A cartoon character of a complex issue is created, and the media pump out clickbait stories based on that.
What’s the most effective way to motivate a more accurate discussion of this topic?
I vehemently disagree. Facts are not up for debate, no matter how much money is behind the people who would like to debate them.
Additionally, implying that corporate executives don't have a platform to push their side of whatever argument they are fighting is inane.
However, you can't change the _fact_ that what they're doing is "legal." The issue is with federal tax policy that needs to be changed.
I'm talking about the nature of calling bullshit on what companies do to their face, rather than PR firms talking to each other, and there's value in that.
Here's the spin that happens (and it's especially bad because it's just published without much challenge):
Any company that dodges taxes always say (to quote Tim Cook): "We pay every single penny of taxes we owe" – which says NOTHING about all the tax dodging these companies did to arrive at a minuscule bill of what was owed, and then, sure, they paid what they owed, correct.
But in that format, where Cook makes a speech, and then someone writes a rebuttal article 2 weeks later, nothing really gets done.
In a debate format, you can quickly say "yeah that's bullshit. You're making a semantic and laser focused argument. It's like saying you didn't kill that person by strangling them, they died because their brain stopped receiving oxygenated blood."
And there's a public record of you pushing back against this BS corporate-speak. You _can't_ do that in the normal, traditional way this is done, which is that:
1) newspaper publishes article of wrongdoing 2) PR firm publishes press release with insane amounts of spin 3) nothing changes.
While we should hold the "truth" to account, open debate cannot be the way to deal with this at every impasse. FedEx is more than welcome to write an article, post a video, or do anything else to rebut the article published by the NYT, but instead has chosen a narrow path in which they can surprise the other party in person with attacks. I fail to understand why open debate is the best way to solve this; at the very least, I don't know where the time to watch these debates about... FedEx and tax avoidance... among the other issues I try to keep current on
You need a strong format, with ample time and good faith actors who will steel man each other's positions instead of strawmanning them.
So ultimately you have both sides debating the strongest version of the opposing side. Here's an example: https://youtu.be/m0-oC_49fq4?t=195
The establishment media made up Russian collusion and after 2 years refuses to apologize for 100% made up claims. They had the balls to give themselves pulitzer and ruin it's legacy. Thank God FedEx is pushing back.
EDIT: and as you pointed out Fedex is just following fed tax policy that it doesn't control.
> The New York Times published a distorted and factually incorrect story [...] this outrageous distortion of the truth [...]
I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. The first sentence says the story is "distorted and factually incorrect" and they later call it an "outrageous distortion of the truth". This statement is screaming "fake news" and "debate me" like some Twitter troll. It is crazy to see this as an official statement from a Fortune 100 company.
No it's not—the era of "journalists" being de facto arbiters of truth is most definitely over.
That is incorrect. According to the article FedEx is referencing [1], the NY Times wrote that FedEx (along with UPS) met regularly with Congressional committee staff who were writing the tax policy and pushed hard for their own agenda.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/business/how-fedex-cut-it...
FedEx spent $10 million on lobbying in 2017, in line with previous spending, with much of it focused on tax issues, according to federal records. Its team pushed hard to shape the bill behind the scenes, meeting regularly with House and Senate committee staff who were writing the provisions.
Mr. Smith met with Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in February 2017, and on May 26 he spoke on the phone with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, according to Mr. Mnuchin’s public calendar.
EDIT: correcting formatting issues.
Maybe we’ll finally get out of the one sided shouting matches that modern journalism seems to encourage.
Perhaps not individually, but a thrust of the article is that these large corporations pay huge amounts to lobbyists to bend tax policy in their favor.
> ese large corporations pay huge amounts to lobbyists to bend tax policy in their favor.
Do we have a way to know if fedex did this?
This is answered in the first paragraph of the nytimes article: "In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard."
There were two claims in the NY Times story:
1) FedEx paid $0 in tax
2) FedEx "has not made good on its promised investment surge"
In response, FedEx wrote in their statement:
1) our billions of dollars of tax payments whereby they dispute paying $0 in taxes
2) $6 billion of capital that FedEx invested in the U.S. economy
This directly contradicts what the NY Times wrote. And then they further point that the NY Times is actually guilty of what the NY Times is accusing FedEx of. How is their statement a farce?
Further, the problem is that the tax code, especially for corporations, is so complex that anyone's tax payments can be spun any way you want them.
For example, I contributed the maximum allowed to my employer's 401k this year. Someone could spin a news story saying, "300bps is avoiding taxes!" because I legally did not pay tax on $19,000 of income I otherwise would've had to.
I don't know the particulars of FedEx's tax situation and honestly it would probably take me days of studying it before I could scratch the surface of understanding it. If FedEx did something illegal, there is a nice tax bounty the NY Times could get for reporting them - https://www.irs.gov/compliance/whistleblower-informant-award
The NY Times is obviously not aware of anything FedEx did that is illegal so instead they put out a piece accusing them of paying $0 tax and not investing enough.
2) $6 billion compared to what (prior to previous years)? No point of reference here.
The response is great theater, but it is carefully worded to not refute the allegations.
1. Fedex is bundling total tax expenditures (state taxes, employment taxes, who knows what, probably the whole kit) versus their federal income tax liability which is what NYTimes is discussing
2. Fedex has been in the 5-6B annual Capex range since FY 2015.
Further, someone could "spin" that 401k treatment, but this is an article about how Fedex rallied hard for specific tax treatments that had a specific effect. So if you wanna go out there and get some carve-out, expect to catch crap for it. If you're a normal person you'll go laughing to the bank with it, but if you're an especially hostile individual I guess you could, like, challenge people to a debate or whatever
It does not. FTA:
> But the company ended its 2018 fiscal year having spent $240 million less on capital investments than it predicted it would in December 2017, shortly before the tax cuts passed. The company’s capital spending declined by nearly $175 million in fiscal 2019.
---
> And then they further point that the NY Times is actually guilty of what the NY Times is accusing FedEx of.
The NYT didn't lobby in favor of the tax cuts and argue it would increase business investment, then fail to actually follow through - not to mention that regardless of the NYT's corporate actions, this has nothing to do with their reporting - and on top of that, the article is about the expected effects of the tax cuts vs. the actual effects on a national level with FedEx as a salient example. Countering with "but they did too" is irrelevant to the point at hand.
> The NY Times is obviously not aware of anything FedEx did that is illegal so instead they put out a piece accusing them of paying $0 tax and not investing enough.
You are ascribing motive to the authors that has no basis in fact. The NYT is making the argument the tax cuts didn't do what they were advertised to do. It's the literal subhead on the article:
> How FedEx Cut Its Tax Bill to $0: The company, like much of corporate America, has not made good on its promised investment surge from President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
I am trying to find where they promised this but can't find anything on google.
anyone have something on this?
https://about.van.fedex.com/point-of-view/policy-perspective...
Doesn't the whole NYT article is based on the fact that Fedex influenced the federal tax policy to avoid to pay theses taxes?
Doesn't the goal of NYT by publishing this article is to show how Fedex gained from the new federal tax policies and thus trying to make that change toward something less generous toward Fedex?
Thus NYT believe that Fedex and themselves can influence the federal tax policies which makes a debate the right kind of platform.
That they didn't do that makes me wonder.
Fedex isn’t just challenging the facts. They are challenging the underlying premise that corporations are a net negative on society.
I think it would be fascinating to see an actual debate by folks that aren’t politicians, but are willing to put their public reputation on the line.
But they are also challenging the facts, and then refusing to state what facts are incorrect.
Actually, they didn't say anything that challenges a single specific fact from the article.
> They are challenging the underlying premise that corporations are a net negative on society.
The article never made that claim (nor even implied it).
What Fedex is doing is attempting to change the discussion from a very specific accusation to, well, anything other than what the specific accusation were. I can't believe otherwise intelligent people fall for this nonsense.
For example, the Wakefield study that led to an entire anti-vaccination movement.
It's not a competition between a media company and a shipping company. It's a piece of journalism.
Either that journalism is accurate or it isn't. If it's wrong they should issue a correction, or review how it could be misleading or slanted and offer an alternate perspective. If it's correct they should stand by it.
In no event does the writing of a journalist, edited by an editor, have anything to do with the NY Times company as a business institution.
To claim otherwise is to buy into a frame that makes literally no sense here. I see why Fedex is doing it, it's apparently effective, even with the analytically sophisticated HN crowd. But this response is nonsense, it's almost a complete non-sequitur.
If I were the writer or editor of the story I'd tell Fedex to get bent. And if I were the publisher I'd patiently explain, yet again, the concept of independent journalism.
The tell is that FedEx calls the NYT article "factually incorrect" but never states exactly what assertions they dispute.
It's as if they want the reader and the media to infer that FedEx actually did pay taxes on billions in profit, or that FedEx actually did increase their investments as the phony rationale for the tax cut promised.
But since FedEx never actually says any of that, and instead just tries to infer it through clever wording, I'm going to trust NYT over this corporate snow job.
When FedEx twists the argument to accuse the NYT of also not increasing their capital investments, the whole thing reeks of Facebook's disinfo campaign to "deny and deflect" fundamentally factual reporting.
This coincidentally also describes the NYTs piece which was also misleading, bordering on activism.
> As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019. Much of its savings have gone to reward shareholders: FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.
edit: Note: the parent commenter ninja-edited in the word "essentially" after I made this comment.
I'd say that paragraph you quoted showcases the misleading writing very nicely.
$2.6,$3.4,$3.6,$3.6,$3.3,$3.8,$5.0,$5.0,$5.1,$5.6
Do you think the article fairly reflects the trends in the company's capital expenditures?
FedEx's lobbying efforts argued reduced taxes would allow them to increase capital spending more than they would have otherwise. Instead, they look to have stuck to their trendline - and 2019's estimated is flat.
Draw those numbers on a chart and it doesn't look like the tax cut generated much of a boost: https://marketrealist.imgix.net/uploads/2018/09/Capex-2.png?...
Article from which the chart is drawn: https://articles2.marketrealist.com/2018/09/a-look-at-fedexs...
Yes, FedEx didn't follow up with the massive new boosts they promised (besides the pension fund). However, the NYT should have included figures and stated it how you are in your comment - that growth factor is what has gone down, not the actual level of investment.
I am not disputing what you say about FedEx, I just want NYT to be more careful and precise in its reporting.
The fact that they instead increased stock buybacks etc. demonstrates a point of detractors of the tax law - that it's proceeds would most likely go back into already-wealthy pockets, not capital investment. It's not unreasonable to point it out here.
They've been building 800,000 square feet of new sort facility at IND for a year and change...
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2018/01/26/fedex-credits...
https://bgabuilders.com/fedex-indianapolis-ob4-project/
It's huge and runs right along side Interstate 70, you can see it from the other side of the airport just off of U.S. 40.
I can walk to my car, drive about 10 yards out of my work parking lot and see it across the airport. It's very real and almost certainly didn't grow out of the ground on its own accord.
They're also expanding in Greenwood, Indiana.
They're also expanding at MEM.
...
https://marketrealist.imgix.net/uploads/2018/09/Capex-2.png?... indicates their spending growth has largely just stayed what it was prior to the tax changes.
Take that out & how does it look?
I guess I'm not clear on what detail you think is missing. To me, their objections and actions are very clearly worded.
I believe they pointed out that they regularly pay taxes, that the tax rate for that year was due to accelerating depreciation, and the NYT is engaged in the same accounting strategies.
Accelerating depreciation has no net tax benefit over the full depreciation period. If the depreciation period is 10 years, but they accelerate in the first year, their net tax rate is the same over the 10 years as if they did not accelerate. They are simply moving their tax burden to the future.
They also took other current expenses to charge their pension, but again, these are expenses that they cannot take in the future - they will pay additional tax on future incomes. The net is the same.
It’s quite clear that some people’s model of taxes comes from doing Turbo Tax, year after year. Even Bernie Sanders does his own taxes. A man that wants to set the tax agenda on multinational corporations.
Just because a company pays zero taxes doesn’t mean that there was any thing fraudulent going on. If there’s zero taxes there’s probably incentives, depreciating assets as you described, losses carried forward, the corporate tax cut, employee stock compensation.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Journalists have an ethical responsibility to be honest, but outside of that there's nothing to say that a journalist cannot have a set of beliefs that shape their worldview.
In this case you aren't really accusing the NYT of being dishonest, you're saying that their honest opinion isn't ok because you have a different opinion (or that a journalist has to be void of any opinions at all). I'd just suggest you skip either that author's work or the NYT in general then, and find something more aligned to your own worldview.
As to the accusation it is "activism?" I mean, yeah, I guess. Arguing that something, anything, is wrong is activism depending on your definitions but since we haven't established that activism is a bad thing or wrong, that's not really problematic in and of itself.
IANAL, but a good example of this is the coverage of the Covington High School students.
IANAL so I don't know the answer, but I hope the answer is no. Since if the answer is yes it would allow a large media organization to thrust anyone into the spotlight and defame them without recourse as long as "actual malice" can't be established (ie the Covington High kids).
FedEx made specific arguments in favor of the cut to shore up support. Those talking points turned out (surprise!) to be untrue. Taxpayers of the United States have subsequently lost out to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars.
What part of that is not news-worthy?
If NYT believes FedEx should pay more in taxes, if the NYT wants the law changed for any reason, I think that's fantastic. I welcome them to register as a PAC, subject themselves to the relevant regulations, give up their press passes, and fight for better tax law.
To me (and the NYT) it's not okay for CEOs to lie and deceive in order to get legislation passed. Especially legislation that enriches their shareholders while hurting the average American taxpayer.
The exact amount they pay is not the issue, and we're in agreement that no laws were broken.
The issue is one of morality not legality. They deserve to be called on their BS and they were.
We have a difference in morals. You claim to have no problem with FedEx lying in order to enrich itself at the expense of hardworking regular people. I do have a problem with it. The New York Times has a problem with it. And judging by this comment section, a lot of hard working Americans have a problem with it.
There's really nothing you can say to morally justify it, which is why you keep deflecting with the "fake news", and "biased reporting" angle. That's all you've brought to the discussion. Yet curiously, you've not been able to cite a single element of the article that is false or misleading.
I'm not calling this fake news. I'm not suggesting it has any factual inaccuracies. I've offered what I feel is a reasonable delineation between straight news journalism and political propaganda. You just keep asserting you and others want to know this information without actually addressing what I'm saying.
If you disagree with me on where the line is between straight news journalism and political activism, that's fine. Can you please provide a general rule or set of rules that we can apply to all articles so that we can tell the difference between journalism and political activism?
Let's go up a few comments where you said:
>I'm still failing to see where this is "news" as opposed to "agenda."
It's right there.
>Can you please provide a general rule or set of rules that we can apply to all articles so that we can tell the difference between journalism and political activism
You made a claim that the article is "propaganda", "activism" and "agenda" (your words). So the onus would be on you to prove your claim. Or at least offer a coherent argument why you believe that. As far as I can tell, the only thing that makes this propaganda in your eyes is (a) it's from the NYT and (b) it opposes your worldview somehow.
Anyhow, I'm going to stop here with this particular thread.
I never said I felt a moral claim to the lost tax revenue. Ever. I've repeated over and over (and over) that it's the lying to the American people that I, and many others find morally repugnant. I don't know how to state it any clearer. I honestly don't. I've made no comments whatsoever of a political nature. Not one.
Is there something about disliking lying which is inherently political? I learned that lying was bad in kindergarten before I even knew what politics was.
You've already proven yourself to be arguing in bad faith with your "I'm not calling this fake news" lie (see directly above), so there's no point in continuing this conversation.
I guess liars defending liars is exactly what I should have expected.
The reality: Lower taxes increased shareholders' bottom line.
The NYT: "Hey FedEX, you lied to the American public. Now they're on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars."
Consultant32452: "The NYT is politically biased for pointing this all out. Fake news!"
Everyone else: ???
Since you have no legal or moral claim to FedEx's money, there's no news here. Your favorite political activist/watchdog group is perfect for this kind of stuff. But it's not journalism. That's the part the really confuses me. I'm not suggesting this story isn't interesting, or perhaps even important. I'm just saying it's not straight news journalism. We have different legal bodies (PACs) which are well equipped to highlight information like this and get people riled up to vote certain ways, boycott companies, etc.
Why are you so hung up on this being considered straight news? How do you differentiate between straight news and political propaganda? I've offered my suggestion. Do a basic literary analysis. If it appears the goal of the author was to inspire particular political outcome, that's political propaganda. And I'm not using propaganda negatively here.
Why are you using sneaky word tricks? I said nothing about increasing shareholder value. I clearly said "shareholders' bottom line". Or put another way, return on investment.
Please don't do that.
> there's no news here
Hardworking Americans losing billions in tax revenue due to the misleading lobbying efforts of major corporations is news. Period. I can't fathom how it couldn't be news. In any other western-style democracy on the planet it would be news.
Now, you might have an issue with how it's reported. Or believe it was only reported to serve an agenda but you can't dispute the facts of what occurred. Except to say, elsewhere on this page that "it doesn't matter" if they lied.
So, you have no issue with what happened. Others find it morally repugnant and a violation of their trust. Therefore, news.
You've dodged my very direct question so I will put it to you again. What is the mechanism by which we, the public, should judge a piece of writing to be able to determine whether it is straight journalism or political activism? Where is the line? That is the only question that matters. This is a question of literary analysis of a piece of writing, not a fact check.
For more, see my other comment. But I'm respectfully bowing out of this thread now.
edit to clarify: and if it is not right then it is of general interest to society and thus it is news
Edit: more to the point, what makes you identify as Fedex?
If NYT wants a law changed, they should acknowledge they are a tax advocacy group and not a news organization, and put forth arguments for changing the law. But what they're doing here is pushing a particular agenda under the guise of journalism. Real journalism doesn't have an agenda. Good journalism aims to minimize bias.
Here is what I am saying. You are not Fedex. You are not even in the same category. It is not apples and oranges. It is apples and dwarf planets. Ergo, any attempt to compare your treatment is.. just not comparable. They are literally big enough to write laws that benefit them. That is news.
Here is what you appear to be saying. We are both tax payers so it is apples and apples comparison. I mean, I use my standard deduction and NYT does not write about me...
Please tell me if I read it wrong.
edit. spelling correction
I want to be clear that my intention is not to debate tax law. I think that's irrelevant.
If the NYT wants the law to change in some way, I think that's fantastic. I welcome them to register as a PAC, subject themselves to the relevant regulations, give up their press passes, and fight for changes to the law. I think they'd be great at it, and I think they have a lot to offer the world in that arena.
I only said that it is news.
You seem to want to move discussion in a completely different direction.
It may come as a surprise to you, but even your cherished Fedex stock report is a piece of propaganda aimed at specic audience ( investors ). It even has a singular political aim in mind.
Can you guess what it is?
I welcome you to provide a different measure. In your opinion, where is the line? How could all observers reasonably differentiate between a piece of straight news journalism and political propaganda?
There's different kinds of bias/activism.
1. Publishing an opinion with facts (blog post/activism)
2. Publishing only the facts that support your political opinion without your political opinion.
3. Publishing all the facts but only while investigating the people you disagree with (not the people you agree with)
4. Investigating all the facts to settle publicly made allegations by politicians or political figures.
So while 1/2/3 might be seen as activism -- #4 is not. If people make the claim that the IRS is toothless when it comes to enforcement of tax collections on large corporations -- finding out the facts is a good way to help settle public debate.
Here's a snippet of the public apology the NYT published after the 2016 election. Maybe with honesty, or without fear or favor means something different to you than it means to me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reade...
>As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.
1. Reporters and editors cannot possibly be aware of their own bias because they have their own world view, through which they perceive their own reality.
2. Because reporters and their editors cannot be aware of their own biases, fundamentally all news is biased, intentionally or unintentionally.
Your argument depends upon #1 to be True. However, people can know their biases and adjust for it. But at the NYT, editors and reporters are aware of their internal biases, so #1 is actually False.
So then #2 leads to something like #3:
3. Fox News, while intentionally biased, provides balance to the obvious left leaning bias of the NYT because of #1 and #2 -- even if they don't fully vet their stories [1].
So personally I would prefer to get my news from people that research and report facts. Facts, in and of themselves, are unbiased.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#Fox_News_r...
So... neither substantive nor particularly entertaining. :(
It’s not going to make a dent in their budget. Any notion that a $40B company somehow is unable to make itself heard is ludicrous. This isn’t a mom-and-pop operation.
EDIT: to replies claiming it's not the same or is blackmail because it requires FedEx to spend money to respond... you do realize that it costs the NYT over $300 million/yr to produce, distribute and market their news product? (Yes, the NYT spends money on ads to get more people to read its stuff, too.)
At a corporate level trying to reach millions of people, speech isn't free for anyone. Distribution costs money, for everyone. This isn't blackmail (sheesh), it's how public dialog between companies works period. And my original point stands: both sides are mega-companies that have plenty of money to promote whatever stories they want.
I will say it one more time: the idea that FedEx, a $40B company, is somehow, in any way, disadvantaged in being able to respond, simply defies credulity.
Edit for typos
NYT sure is spending money, but it is ultimately making money by publishing this article, or else they woudldn't do it. They are making more money by making it more sensational.
FedEx would spends money to responds, ironically, they would have to spends it most probably to NYT. NYT will again spends money to publish that full page ads, sure, but they are making money by publishing it, or else they wouldn't do it either.
They aren't on equal footing. NYT makes money with that article.
All speech has both subjective emotive content ("power") and objective factual content ("truth"), and the interplay between them is part of what makes speech effective. In times of hegemony, though, the "power" content of speech is downplayed. Power relations within society are taken for granted, and it's pointless to challenge them, because the best case is that your words will be discounted as crazy and the worst case is that that power will be exercised against you, potentially with life-ending consequences. Think about speaking out against a totalitarian government, or being a communist during the McCarthy era.
In times of multipolarity, the "truth" aspect of speech is downplayed, and discourse is all about power. Think of nationalism in the 1870s, or yellow journalism in the early 1900s (right as British hegemony was collapsing into the multipolar world that led up to WW1). Papers would publish plenty of stories that simply weren't true, but the point wasn't truth: it was to boost their circulation numbers and amass more power and influence in a world that was rapidly collapsing into a system of warring powers.
Trump, SJWs, white nationalists, MRAs, cryptocurrency advocates, anti-vaxxers, Russian cyber-trolls, and Democratic Socialists are all other instances of this phenomena: they are small splinter groups vying for mindshare because they see that the existing power structure is collapsing and will leave behind a vacuum, and they all distort the "truth" (which was always distorted before by power relations, but not to this extent) in a bid to gain more followers. Some corporations are catching on, and this FedEx statement is an example of this: note that they posted it as an open letter, on their own company blog, rather than as a press release. They don't care whether the NYTimes actually accepts their debate or not, they want to make the public statement to undermine the legitimacy of the NYTimes as a source of truth itself.
Im open to hearing an alternative argument instead of just folks downvoting. What do you think is inaccurate or misleading here?
I'd go farther and say that it is disheartening. It also seems to be completely aligned with the post-modernist way of evaluating/describing the world.
Nothing to do with post modernism, it's a version of Marxism that is compatible with capitalism. Post modernists can't be ideologues by definition. Intersectionality is very much an ideology. People who believe that don't ask question, they do finger pointing and public shaming to try to change and control public discourse. It's very reminiscent of the soviet union era, except it doesn't come from the state but a group of people that hold a certain power of influence, ironically.
That is incorrect, albeit precisely what FedEx (and many other subjects of investigative journalism) would like us to believe.
When "all news is fake news" becomes widespread public perception, that public is doomed to authoritarian rule, most likely by leaders backed by the business elite.
The point of contention is whether after arguing that a tax cut was needed to do capital investment, did the savings from the tax cut actually go to capital investment, or merely financial trickery of stock buy backs as the critics of the tax cut predicted.
Literally everything else is a distraction.
That is the straw man.
I'd also like to highlight that as much as people fear government control of subsidized news sources - both PBS and NPR have been quite decently independent, with PBS in particular not having qualms about investigating the government when warranted.
1) Subscribe to NYT
2) Notice they are still serving you ads
3) Try to cancel your subscription
They create an "obstacle" to cancelling your subscription. The "obstacle" is you have to make phone call and talk to one of their agents who will try to keep you as a subscriber by offering a discount on the subscription.
It's a good way to extend your introductory payment plan (or close to it).
You can still cancel, of course, just be firm and say so. Not a big deal.
You don't even need to be firm or argue. I've had to cancel my NYT subscription several times over the years. Sometimes I moved to a place where delivery wasn't available. Others because I was between jobs. The people on the phone are very polite and professional. They will offer you discounts, but they won't ever give you a hard sell. At least in my experience.
Do they offer intractably complex subscriptions meant to deceive you into buy more than what you need ? No.
Do they prey on old people and talk them into services they neither use nor understand? No.
Do they call you on a regular basis to nag you about an upgrade to your subscription? No.
Do they send you mail 1-2 times a month with one of those stupid credit-card-sized cardboard ads with a deal on them? No.
Do they automatically jack-up your bill as soon as intro is over? Yes. That's about as close as they get to cable TV. It's not good, but it's not evil either. You can, AFAIK, extend a discount indefinitely by calling them up and asking for it.
Notice that so many newspapers are going out of business but the NYT is not.
Does the NYT deliver higher quality reporting than Alex Jones? Yes, of course they do, but they are neither perfect nor omniscient nor unbiased nor purely virtuous in their motivations.
Let’s turn this around, shall we? When the public implicitly trusts media corporations that are operated for profit and owned by billionaires, they are doomed to authoritarian rule, most likely by leaders backed by the business elite that owns and operates these media corporations in the first place.
Implicit trust of any institution is a shortcut to authoritarian rule. And every authoritarian justifies themselves by accusing others of being a greater threat. The only proper attitude for a free people is to distrust and resist any institution that holds or seeks power, and that includes the mainstream press.
That's something that has literally never been the case. Skepticism exists on a sliding scale, and children are taught in high school how to spot a biased headline, a poor use of a statistic, and so on.
When it comes to the public's attitude toward the press, it's not credulousness versus skepticism that exists, it's healthy skepticism versus cynicism.
To wit, I don’t characterize as “healthy skepticism” the propagation of the outright lie, in this very thread, that the NYT is not a business.
You know, it's before my time, but when Cronkite suggested in 1968 that the United States withdraw from Vietnam, I believe what he said was taken seriously. I do not believe it resulted in the country unifying behind the peace movement and immediately withdrawing from Vietnam, which is the sort thing that would happen if "most people unquestioningly accepted whatever Walter Cronkite told them."
> The mainstream media is terrified by the gradual erosion of this power and is desperately trying to convince everyone that it’s better for society at large for them to hold that level of implicit public trust. This is even more true for newspapers, which have always considered themselves of higher status than television anyway.
The less hyperbolic and more accurate way to state all this is, they believe their work is important and something the public should take seriously. Those monsters.
It took a few years, but the ultimate outcome of the Vietnam War was probably sealed at that moment, and everybody including President Johnson and Walter Cronkite himself knew it.
More essential though was the unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream media's power to selectively report the facts they considered most pertinent, to decide the issues of the day by choosing what to report and what not to report, and to establish governing narratives around their coverage. There is an enormous degree of power that the media can and does exercise in this fashion. Today that power is much less centralized than it once was. I consider this a net good, and am suspicious of any nostalgia for the days of greater centralization.
> The less hyperbolic and more accurate way to state all this is, they believe their work is important and something the public should take seriously.
I take the work of the media seriously enough to be critical towards it rather than abiding by lies about how media corporations aren't actually corporations.
That's actually not something I argued, although I understand there's a subthread or something about it.
> More essential though was the unquestioning acceptance of the mainstream media's power to selectively report the facts they considered most pertinent, to decide the issues of the day by choosing what to report and what not to report, and to establish governing narratives around their coverage. There is an enormous degree of power that the media can and does exercise in this fashion. Today that power is much less centralized than it once was. I consider this a net good, and am suspicious of any nostalgia for the days of greater centralization.
I'm not sure how much I actually agree or disagree because you're being so blatantly hyperbolic ("unquestioning acceptance," etc.) about things that frankly aren't key to what I believe is the interesting point.
Decentralization and news apart from the mainstream media seems like it should be be a great benefit. Like them or not, it was never a good situation that GE owned NBC, one family owned the Washington Post, or whatever. The trouble is, one thing that has not happened has been greater empowerment of small newspapers and local journalists who are best positioned to serve their communities. They're simply being driven out of business by large companies.
On the other hand, "mainstream media" is often just code for non-conservative media, whatever exists outside of Fox, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and assorted AM radio garbage. If that's how you look at things, the "mainstream media" is definitely losing some market share and mindshare.
> It took a few years, but the ultimate outcome of the Vietnam War was probably sealed at that moment, and everybody including President Johnson and Walter Cronkite himself knew it.
Johnson made a comment to the effect that he'd just lost the war, but when it came to war fighting, Johnson was honestly quite an idiot. The ultimate outcome of the war had many more years to be determined and a lot of other people had their say, including, you know, the enemy.
Yep--in fact, it's the very same subthread you replied to.
Where'd you get that from?
It's completely legitimate to hold NY Times management accountable here.
Do you have a source for this bold statement?
That's like all those conspiracy theories about anti-virus companies putting out viruses to boost sales.
/Worked in journalism.
[1] http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
The same is true here - leaving out the context that FedEx has spent ~$50b on capex in the past 10 years and recognized $8.2b of income tax expense in the same 10 year period (which is not all US fedral, and might not have been the amount remitted over that period) changes the tone of the story. Additionally, really all that is happening is that tax collections go down a bunch in one year and up for the following six years, the only gain is on time value of money)
They called them on a public debate.
Why should a response or dialogue have to be in print? And why should a company's defense be limited to asynchronous communication? Debate is an accepted and effective dispute resolution framework, especially in areas where truth or fairness may be nuanced and is far from black and white. (Tax policy is a perfect example that is both nebulous and politically charged.)
As arbiters and outers of wrongdoing, journalists play a critical role in speaking truth to power and holding parties to account. This does not absolve them from publicly defending their positions, or being challenged on them, however. FedEx is well within their rights in responding in whatever manner they see fit, same as NYT can agree or reject the challenge.
Debate certainly ups the ante for all involved and is an interesting escalation tactic in the current media landscape.
For instance, why is it that the Democratic and GOP primaries never crossed paths? Shouldn't they have organized some R vs D debates before the final two candidates? Or what about FCC vs net neutrality advocates? Kaepernick vs Police Chief? I can think of lots of interesting pairings that will sadly never happen.
It's an extremely blatant and I thought transparent attempt to change the subject, but, if the first fifteen comments here are any indication, a surprisingly effective one.
Corporate taxes should be replaced by an increase in capital gains tax.
The United States has had a corporate income tax since 1909, but in all the years since there is a major question about it that economists haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily: who pays it? [...] Probably most people assume that the corporate income tax is largely paid by consumers of its products or services. That is, they assume that although the tax is nominally levied on the corporation as a whole, in fact the burden of the tax is shifted onto customers in the form of higher prices.
All economists reject that idea. [...] That leaves two remaining groups that may bear the burden of the corporate tax: workers and shareholders. [...] Most economists now agree that the burden of the corporate income tax falls on labor to some extent, but there is disagreement over the degree. [...] People should be aware that even the best academic economists disagree on the basics of who actually pays the corporate tax.
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/who-pays-the-c...
Who are the workers? We are.
Who are the shareholders? We are.
No matter which role you allocate the cost of the tax to, in the end it's us who are paying the bill. Even if you're one of those rare individuals without investments of your own, you still benefit from them. Punishing the shareholders who provide the capital to produce goods more efficiently isn't going to make the goods you consume any cheaper.
In fact, since there are many consumers of US products (and shareholders in US companies) who are not resident or citizens of the US then it seems we win more if we raise those corporate taxes. If the shareholder's don't like this deal I suggest they sell.
Using corporate taxes to shift the burden onto foreigners, as you've suggested, is at best a short-term tactic. The other countries would just enact reciprocal policies and we'd be back where we started, except with less international trade and poorer diplomatic relations. Isolationism is not a recipe for domestic economic bliss.
> Companies that make up the S&P 500 index had an average effective tax rate of 18.1 percent in 2018, down from 25.9 percent in 2016, according to an analysis of securities filings. More than 200 of those companies saw their effective tax rates fall by 10 points or more. Nearly three dozen, including FedEx, saw their tax rates fall to zero or reported that tax authorities owed them money.
> From the first quarter of 2018, when the law fully took effect, companies have spent nearly three times as much on additional dividends and stock buybacks, which boost a company’s stock price and market value, than on increased investment.
This is concrete, relevant data (unlike the argument made by the FedEx CEO, as others have already mentioned). I'm curious if anyone in the pro-Fedex crowd can provide evidence to the contrary.
The increasing share of wealth that is moving from the bottom 90% into the hands of the top 1% in the US is a real concern to me. And I suspect a big part of that has to do with the recent trend of stock buybacks and dividend increases, which benefits shareholders and not workers. How many people in the bottom 50% (or even 90%) actually own a significant amount of stock, do you think?
The first source I found on this topic states: [1]
In 2016, American households headed by someone aged 32-61 averaged $120,809.40 in retirement savings, or $264,453.30 using an expansive calculation. Using the same calculations and definitions, American households have a median of $7,800 and $17,000 saved, respectively.
[1] https://dqydj.com/retirement-savings-average-median-percenti...
But that contradicts the claimed raison d'être for the 2018 tax cut: that corporate direct investment was being restrained by corporate income taxes.
A call to lower corporate income taxes so more money could flow to investors would have been consistent, both with economic orthodoxy and with the observed outcome.
Is that a bad thing? I'm thinking it is good.
Why do people want higher taxes for?
I'm thinking lower taxes reduces the amount of money going to the government is good. The government is horribly inefficient due things such as bureaucracy, corruption, etc. No matter where they operate, it hasn't been good. Whether it's US or China, the gov't is not where I think money should go.
That's what the rich hand powerful want you to think. But the facts don't support it. Look at any of the other top western democracies. You know, the ones with longer lifespans, more upward mobility, happier populations, better infrastructure, better education, and so on.
I'm not suggesting that those countries are perfect or that there aren't gross inefficiencies, but the widespread belief that good government is basically impossible, so why even try is mostly an American (right wing) phenomenon.
Other top-tier western style democracies, despite their many imperfections, are doing just fine.
It does nothing to support your assertion that any and all governments are inherently bad.
In my next comment, I again was talking about taxes. I used communism as an example of a high tax system. I also wanted to point out that western style democracies which you call good, lean toward capitalism, where gov't have a smaller role in society - which I am using to support my lower tax argument.
At the height of the American war effort, the top tax bracket exceeded 90% of individual income[1] this dramatically decreased inequality and established the modern middle class. It was also arguably the most stable and prosperous time for families, with most able to sustain with a single-income earner.
Bernie Sanders suggests that we respond to the ongoing climate crisis with a similar level of world-war scale effort with the hopes of averting even worse, more destabilizing effects.
1. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/how-federal-incom...
I'm not sure I'm "pro-Fedex", but:
"stock buybacks, which boost a company’s stock price and market value"
Stock buybacks do not increase the company's market value. Cash goes out, stock comes in. Balance sheet is the same.
My second point would be: is 2 years long enough to determine the effects of the tax cut? Companies the size of Fedex can't make massive changes to budgets overnight.
In the first step, the market value is a constant, taking out the number of shares thus increases directly the share price. Which are than further increased by increased demand and increasing the market value as now the number of shares is constant.
So yes, buy backs directly increase the market value. Why else would companies do them? They also have the nice side effect of increasing the value of execs' stock options, again a nice motivation for a CEO to do a buyback.
Yes, tax reform helped FedEx lower their tax bill. But a huge chunk of that was due to temporary behavior changes FedEx made in response to the bill - not a permanent reduction in how much they will owe each year. One of the ways they saved a lot of money was investing a lot into assets for which they could deduct 100% of future depreciation immediately. This is a temporary part of tax reform. They would have been able to deduct that value eventually anyway, just over a long period of time.
They did not explain the 100% deduction for asset depreciation, or the fact that it's only a temporary provision of the law. They merely included a brief statement from FedEx referencing this provision in sort of generic terms.
They also mentioned very briefly that a large part of the reduced tax bill was FedEx's pension contribution, but didn't provide any additional details about how tax reform encouraged this behavior.
They also include misleading statements like this:
> “Something like $1.5 billion in future taxes that they had promised to pay, just vanished,” said Matthew Gardner, an analyst at the liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington.
The idea that FedEx had "promised" to pay that money is just ridiculous.
Yup, which also means subsequent year taxes will be higher, because the assets are fully tax depreciated.
It seems like the real story is how the NYT is actively campaigning for the DNC and I'm glad FedEx is calling them out.
Here lies the problem. One's tax burden should not be determined by your cleverness to dodge them, but some inarguable, tangible value. Like a bill.
The tax law holes that allow for "creative" corporate financial "solutions" (like moving HQ to Ireland) and their ilk should be patched with dramatically simpler tax law.
The government should simply bill people and corporations for their tax, outright, like they do in many other countries.
That being said, it's a non-story that people will use all the laws available to them to lower their taxes. They are after all the actual tax law and not "holes", as tempting as it is to label them that.
Here are some examples:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/business/economy/corporat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strat...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/business/yesterday-outrag...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/apple-avoided-bi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/06/us/panama-papers.html
The focus of the debate should be federal tax policy and the relative societal benefits of business investments and the enormous intended benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners.
But this above is not what the piece was about..
Now I'm confused..