6 ms·
Expected behavior coming from New York Times. Good on Fedex for pushing back.
by sarcasmatwork 7y ago
Expected behavior coming from New York Times. Good on Fedex for pushing back.
- mmazing 7y agoCare to elaborate?
- chrismeller 7y agoNot 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.
- mmazing 7y agoThere, that wasn't so hard. Take a lesson, OP, list specific verifiable arguments instead of ad hominem "yeah those guys suck as usual".
- chrismeller 7y agoWait, I’m verifiable? Who knew?!
- Shivetya 7y agoNYT 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.
- unethical_ban 7y agoYou 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.
- mmazing 7y agoHow do you feel about the difference in income tax rates from the mid twentieth century to now for the upper wealth brackets?
- whatthesmack 7y agoThe rates that nobody paid, because of tax "loopholes"? There's no reason to compare rates that nobody paid.
- larnmar 7y agoI’d rather go back to the early 20th century when income taxes weren’t even a thing, and yet everything still worked somehow.
- frockington1 7y agoA step in the right direction. The lower the better in my opinion, the federal government is long past its prime
- mmazing 7y agoIs that because you think that the federal government doesn't properly utilize the tax dollars that it receives? If the federal government is past its prime, what do you think that the future of the United States should look like?
- malvosenior 7y ago> 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.
- mc32 7y agoYou’d think they’d have their house in order before besmirching someone else... good on FedEx calling them out.
- scott_s 7y agoJournalists 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.
- dantheman 7y agoThe 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.
- mc32 7y agoIf 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.”
- nkrisc 7y agoWhich facts about FedEx were misrepresented?
- pastor_elm 7y agowhat exactly was not factual in there article? The statement doesn't mention any specifics.
- tootie 7y agoIt'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.
- pastor_elm 7y agoThere'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.
- DerpyBaby123 7y agoThey can 'push back' best by saying what was incorrect about the article in question
- mcguire 7y agoOr just say, "Nuh-uh! You did it, too!" That seems to work.
- jmull 7y agoUh, 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.
- ryanmercer 7y ago>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. https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2018/01/26/fedex-credits-tax-cuts-1-5-billion-expansion-indianapolis-hub/1068813001/ 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/ https://bgabuilders.com/fedex-indianapolis-ob4-project/
- drak0n1c 7y agoThank 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?
- jrockway 7y agoThey spent $850,000,000 on a new building in New York City in 2007.
- ryanmercer 7y agoWhat does 2007 have to do with this article or subject?
- callmeal 7y agoLets 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.
- mmazing 7y agoMore of the "but what about them" logic, or "they did it too so it's fine". NYT should put out an article criticizing themselves AND FedEx, maybe they're both shitty but doesn't excuse one or the other.
- mthoms 7y agoIf the NYT made the same B.S. arguments in favor of the tax cut then sure. But they did no such thing.
- tathougies 7y agoIt 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.
- nkrisc 7y agoBut 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!