Tag Archives: politics

A Taxing Case

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Apple won its appeal of a European Commission ruling that it owed €13 billion ($15 billion) in back taxes because Ireland had illegally subsidized the company.

The General Court agreed with Ireland’s argument that the matter wasn’t an illegal subsidy because the nation cut similar tax deals with all comers.

The EU, of course, is not happy. It’s Tax Justice Coordinator (no irony in that title), Tove Maria Ryding, said,

If we had a proper corporate tax system, we wouldn’t need long court cases to find out whether it is legal for multinational corporations to pay less than 1% in taxes.

She’s not far wrong, but not in the way she intends. If the EU had a proper corporate tax system, if it were truly interested in tax justice, if the rest of the member nations had proper corporate tax systems, the EU and its constituents would have far lower tax rates and be more effective competitors with Ireland, Luxembourg, and Netherlands on taxes and business attractions.

Then neither the EU nor its other constituent nations would need long court cases in efforts to force low-tax nations to raise their taxes, which would only be to the detriment of those nations’ businesses and citizens. And the EU and those other constituent nations’ citizens could share in the prosperity the citizens of the three enjoy, rather than forcing those to their prosperity and opportunities to the level of the rest.

Market Performance

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Great Britain has decided to bar the People’s Republic of China’s telecom company, Huawei, from participating in the British build-out of their 5G network.

The PRC isn’t happy. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian:

Whether the UK will provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese businesses offers a telling clue to how the post-Brexit British market will perform and how secure China’s investment will be in that country. So, we will be closely following the situation.

I certainly hope it’s a telling clue, given that PRC companies are extensions of that government’s intelligence gathering facility.

Besides, diversity in 5G network buildout and operation, which will be facilitated by avoiding Huawei participation and domination, will only enhance the communications market; enhancing national security in the several nations is a happy additional outcome.

Foolishness

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The United Teachers Los Angeles union put out a paper earlier this month, and among the union’s claims is this one”

Police violence is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue.

Wow.

There are thousands of blacks killed or traumatized and families traumatized by other blacks every year. Police violence causes more black deaths and trauma than that?

Thousands of black babies murdered in the womb every year. Police violence causes more black deaths and trauma than that?

The UTLA is insulting the intelligence of all of us with this…foolishness. The UTLA is especially demonstrating its soft bigotry of low expectations with this insult to the intelligence of blacks.

The UTLA doesn’t care a fig about the welfare of blacks or of black children or of any of our children or of any of us. The union just wants money.

Full stop.

Experimenter Bias

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There is a study newly released that purports to link willingness to honor social distance guidelines during the present Wuhan Virus situation to our mental capacity in retaining multiple pieces of potentially conflicting information in our head, which is referred to as working memory capacity.

What interests me isn’t so much the nature of this paper as an example of the publish or perish paradigm of what passes for scholarship in what passes for academia today. Nor is it the purported linkage.

It’s this claim by the lead author, Weizhen Xie, a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health:

As a researcher in cognitive psychology, I feel that it is our duty to figure out why some people follow the developing norm of social distancing while others ignore it.

Xie needs first to investigate the role or experimenter bias in forming hypotheses. A researcher in cognitive psychology should know better.

There is no “developing norm of social distancing.” Social distancing is only temporary stopgap for interrupting an infection cycle.

Canceling

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It’s really gone too far—as if the first occurrence hadn’t already taken the false piety too far.

ESPN suspended NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski a day after a profane email from him to Senator Josh Hawley [R, MO] was leaked to social media, according to multiple reports.
Outkick and the New York Post both reported that the basketball reporter was suspended. The newspaper reported he was suspended without pay. It was unclear how long the suspension is for.

Wojnarowski’s offense was the end of an exchange wherein Hawley had criticized the NBA’s timidity and hypocrisy regarding “pre-approved, social justice slogans” on jerseys after “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. Wojnarowski’s response was a two-word crudity.

Then he publicly apologized.

Wojnarowski plainly screwed up, badly. But he apologized, and did so without hiding his apology under a bushel. Now it’s time—or it should be—to see whether he’s actually changing his behavior, correcting it.

Insufficient, though, and we got yet another overreaction by the Left’s Kancel Kulture, this time by a cowardly corporate manager, the Timid One in charge of ESPN.

Plainly, the Left does not believe in second chances. The Left does not believe in rehabilitation. The Left does not believe in the possibility of redemption.

Every error—as defined by the Left—must be a capital crime.