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...
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."
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.