Category: Uncategorized

Tax cuts are terrible incentives

A straightforward industrial policy would be vastly preferable to abstract arguments with no means of holding corporations accountable for their failure to follow through on the theory:

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.

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.

Four months later, President Donald Trump signed into law the $1.5 trillion tax cut that became his signature legislative achievement. FedEx reaped big savings, bringing its effective tax rate to less than zero in fiscal year 2018 from 34{f18bb1fdf52d98bded86883b9be18028c561f8992f79c47739bf349fa8a297cc} in fiscal year 2017, meaning that, overall, the government technically owed it money. But it did not increase investment in new equipment and other assets in the fiscal year that followed as Smith said businesses like his would.

Nearly two years after the tax law passed, the windfall to corporations like FedEx is becoming clear. A New York Times analysis of data compiled by Capital IQ shows no statistically meaningful relationship between the size of the tax cut that companies and industries received and the investments they made. If anything, the companies that received the biggest tax cuts increased their capital investment by less, on average, than companies that got smaller cuts.

From free trade to immigration to corporate tax cuts, the more one examines economic theories in practice, the more obviously false one observes them to be.

Corporate Cancer audiobook

The audiobook+ for Corporate Cancer is now available at Arkhaven Comics for $14.99. Narrated by Bob Allen, the audiobook+ includes the ebook in both Epub and Kindle formats and is 4 hours and 51 minutes long.

Supporters of the Replatforming should check their emails, as you will receive a coupon for a free download that is valid until December 2nd. Be sure to download your ebooks and audiobooks before then!

The paperback will be shipping to Heroes of the Resistance next week. The audiobook will also be available on Audible in the next two weeks or so.

UPDATE: If you were having initial trouble with the Patreon code, try again. It should work now.

UPDATE: David Stewart reviews Corporate Cancer on his YouTube channel:

Chick-Fil-A cucks

The chicken restaurant takes its first big step toward corporate convergence:

Chick-Fil-A said on Monday that it has stopped funding two Christian charities after coming under fire in recent weeks from LGBTQ activists. The fast-food chain’s foundation has donated millions of dollars to The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Both organizations have a history of opposing same-sex marriage.

Chick-fil-A said it no longer funds the organizations.

“We made multi-year commitments to both organisations and we fulfilled those obligations in 2018,” a spokeswoman for Chick-fil-A told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding the company would focus its giving on “education, homelessness and hunger.”

When reached by CNBC, the company declined to comment further.

The Atlanta-based company has faced criticism in the past for its charitable donations and CEO Dan Cathy’s public comments opposing gay marriage. As Chick-fil-A expands outside of its stronghold in the southeastern U.S., activists have put pressure on the company.

This echoes the convergence of NASCAR. Forsaking the existing audience in favor of chasing one that they will never find.

The prince’s pizza party

Prince Andrew’s televised interview has been widely seen as an unmitigated disaster, but the prince nevertheless considered it to have been a complete success:

The Duke of York attempted to ‘set the record straight’ by speaking about the sex allegations against him during a sit-down with Maitlis at Buckingham Palace. He completely refuted any wrongdoing in the interview but he was widely condemned for showing a lack of remorse over his friendship with Epstein. Despite many calling his performance a ‘PR disaster’, the prince is thought to have spoken to the Queen at a church service on Sunday, describing the interview as a ‘great success’.

How to rectify the two positions? I suspect both perspectives are correct. While it was obviously a PR disaster, Prince Andrew doesn’t give a damn about what the public thinks. It appears that what the prince was doing was akin to Kevin Spacey’s weird, but successful warning that if he was abandoned to be held accountable for his crimes, he would spill everything about everyone else.

I very much doubt it is a strange coincidence that Prince Andrew said he was at a children’s pizza party rather than at a club he was known to frequent. My interpretation of this weirdly specific detail is that he was warning his fellow evildoers that if they don’t get him out of his present predicament, he’ll tell the legal authorities in the UK and in the USA everything about their crimes against children.

Everyone has figured out Shapiru now

Even those who are not – to the best of my knowledge – Christians now understand the intrinsic falsehood of Shapiru, Prager, Crenshaw, and other neoclowns attempting to sell the “Judeo-Christian” lie and how they are attempting to redefine and undermine Western civilization:

Shapiro is probably the smartest of the con-men deployed by Conservative Inc., but he is also the most thin-skinned. Any push-back is met with a childish tantrum. Like Charlie Kirk, it suggests he is a hothouse flower, carefully protected by his handlers, in order to maintain the charade.

If you pay attention to his act, what comes through is he has a deep, subconscious hatred of white people. Take for example his promotion of the dubious claim that European civilization is defined by Judeo-Christian tradition. For most of Western history, Christianity and Judaism were at odds. In the early medieval period, Jews and Christians competed for converts. When the term Judeo-Christian came into use in the 17th and 18th century, it was as a Pauline pejorative against Catholicism.

Putting aside the history, what he is doing is rewriting the European past in order to make it dependent on his religious and ethnic traditions. You can have your Christianity, as long as it is accepting of Jews, which neuters the theologically. You can also have your Western chauvinism, as long as you make sure Jews are central characters in the narrative. Ben Shapiro’s view of Western civilization is colonial, as if he is allowing white people to have some conditional cultural heritage.

This becomes clear when Shapiro says “white civilization is nonsensical.” He says that “civilization is defined by culture, history and philosophy.” He is divorcing what he calls Western civilization from the people who created it. Like his sleight of hand swapping out Catholicism from the heart of European history, he is turning Western civilization into a gift inexplicably granted to the people of Europe. It is not something European people created, but something they received, like hitting the lottery.

There is an obvious implication to this train of thought. If white people are just lucky recipients of civilization, then they are not really deserving of it.

Reject the lies and those who push them. The lie is the loose thread that, when pulled, eventually reveals the inversive evil underneath.

Pure inversion

Gay Republican Pirate edition:

Dan Crenshaw@DanCrenshawTX
In 2020, remember this:

Republicans are the party of Uber.

Democrats are the party of taxi cab unions.

Own your own labor, work where you want and how you want, and embrace innovation. That’s conservatism.

So to conserve is to change? Allowing millions of foreigners to invade, to work where they want and to work how they want is conserving the nation and the society? This is 100-percent inversion. And where you see inversion, you can be certain there is pure sulfur underlying it.

UPDATE: Speaking of inversion, a neoclown is now selling tolerant liberal conservatism.

Eric Weinstein@EricRWeinstein
Don’t get sold the narrative that Trump now owns ALL US Conservatism. He does own a good chunk of it. But there‘s also a new strain of tolerant conservatism that‘s very liberal: relentlessly civil, anti-inequality, pro-logic, pro-gay, pro-weed, pro-free speech & multicultural.

President Trump doesn’t own conservatism. Conservatism is dead. And America will eventually be much the better for its passing.

The impeccable logic of transracism

If men can identify as women, there is no rational reason to deny those of one race the ability to identify as the member of another race. In fact, the transracial case is stronger, given that racial labels are, unlike sex chromosomes, genuinely social constructs. Godfrey Elfwick was right all along. #Wrongskin

Anyone should be allowed to ‘identify’ as black regardless of the colour of their skin or background, according to Left-wing university leaders.

The Universities and Colleges Union has set out its stance in a report on the ongoing row about whether men should be able to self-identify as women and be treated as female regardless of their anatomy.

The UCU’s ‘position statement’ did not just stand by its support for self-identification of gender, but also insisted people can choose their own race, saying: ‘Our rules commit us to ending all forms of discrimination, bigotry and stereotyping. UCU has a long history of enabling members to self-identify whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women.’ 

Denying one’s ability to racially self-identify is inarguably transphobic and if we’ve learned one thing in the last year, it is that transphobia trumps both sexism and racism. And the very worst transphobia is transracism.

The Devil Mouse molests children

The Vice-President of Operations at Disney and two lesser employees were recently arrested and/or convicted of abusing children as young as seven.

A former Disney executive has been convicted of sexually abusing a 7-year-old girl. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports 73-year-old Michael Laney was convicted Tuesday of four counts of first-degree sexual abuse after a six-day trial.

Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Benjamin Souede acquitted Laney of three counts of rape and three counts of sex abuse.

Court documents say Laney began abusing the victim in 2009 and there were multiple incidents of abuse spanning about two years.

The child initially reported the abuse in 2017 in Washington, where she lived at the time.

Another person reported that Laney had sexually abused her in 2007 when she lived in Portland, but the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said the court couldn’t find sufficient evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

The very few reports that are out there describe Laney in generic terms as “a former Disney executive”. He was a little bit more than that, according to his resume:

  • Senior Vice-President: Warner Bros. Feature Animation
  • Vice-President of Operations: Walt Disney Feature Animation 

Michael Laney has over thirty-five years of senior level executive management experience as President, Chief Operating Officer or Chief Financial Officer for divisions of Fortune 50 companies as well as smaller, privately owned for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations. During the last four years, Michael has split his time between Portland and Los Angeles serving the non-profit sector providing CFO and consulting services for four non-profit organizations as well as being on two for-profit advisory boards and one governmental entity.

Notice how these sex criminals preying upon children are always reported as “former Disney employees” even when they were clearly working for Disney at the time they committed their crimes. The moral corruption is active on all levels; from top to bottom, Disney is one of the most evil corporations on the planet. It goes well beyond the usual social justice convergence. You should not even consider supporting its new streaming service in any way, shape, or form.