Expected behavior coming from New York Times. Good on Fedex for pushing back.
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.
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
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.
That seems to work.
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.
So if expected behavior of the NYT is factual reporting, I'd say they're on the money!
Take 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.