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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Taxes

1. December 14, 2010 11:12 AM

   “Uncertainty” Trotted Out in the Journal

   Business code for "we may not get our way"

   By Ryan Chittum

   If there's one thing our titans of industry can't stand, it's uncertainty. We've seen that excuse trotted out over and over again to explain why they're not hiring and why they ought get their way politically. The Journal goes page one today with a story on the hash that our increasingly sclerotic political system has made of the tax code,...

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2. February 8, 2011 11:52 AM

   Bloomberg Markets Finds the Rich Taking From the Poor

   By Ryan Chittum

   Bloomberg Markets has a terrific investigation into how a federal program meant to spur redevelopment in poor areas is funneling taxpayer money to luxury projects and Big Finance. David Dietz's anecdotal lede encapsulates the story, showing that the New Markets program gave Prudential big bucks for its part in the $116 million renovation of downtown Chicago's Blackstone Hotel, a "Beaux...

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3. October 3, 2012 06:40 PM

   Forbes’s myth of the Reagan boom

   A columnist's misleading economic history

   By Ryan Chittum

   Peter Ferrara, currently of the climate-change denying Heartland Institute and formerly of Jack Abramoff's payroll and the Reagan and Bush I administrations, writes for Forbes that Mitt Romney will cut middle class taxes, no matter what Barack Obama's attack ads say. Maybe so, but since Romney's plan is mathematically impossible, the candidate doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. Romney's...

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4. March 25, 2011 02:14 PM

   NYT Is Superb On General Electric’s Tax Avoidance

   Plus, David Kocieniewski continues his Charlie Rangel exposés

   By Ryan Chittum

   (UPDATE: See my follow-up post on GE's poor PR response to the Times's story) The New York Times unloads a fantastic piece of reporting on General Electric and taxes this morning. It's an ugly portrait of GE and the political system it's helped create. David Kocieniewski zeroes in on GE's tax avoidance, which is a proud corporate strategy at Obama...

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5. April 10, 2012 11:37 AM

   The Seattle Times Takes On Hometown Amazon

   A tough series on the dark side of the booming local company

   By Ryan Chittum

   Here in Seattle, Amazon is growing like crazy, adding thousands of jobs and building several skyscrapers just off downtown, something that will add hundreds of construction jobs. But at what cost? That's what The Seattle Times asks in a tough, excellent four-part series that riffs off the company's logo to go "Behind the smile in Seattle." I'm particularly interested in...

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6. August 3, 2011 06:38 PM

   WSJ Fronts Amazon’s Tax Avoidance Strategy

   Color-coded maps tell employees which states are safe, bad, and neutral

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's nice to see The Wall Street Journal take a page-one look at Amazon's aggressive tax avoidance, something I've written about quite a bit here at The Audit. Its story establishes even more clearly that avoiding sales taxes is a core part of the company's business and has been from the beginning. The Journal reports that Amazon went to great...

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7. June 28, 2011 02:25 PM

   A Bloomberg Investigation Exposes Cisco’s Tax Hypocrisy

   CEO pushes for a repatration holiday while working hard to move profits overseas

   By Ryan Chittum

   Cisco's billionaire CEO John Chambers has led the recent campaign to let multinationals repatriate their overseas profits to the U.S. at an 85 percent discount. So it's particularly awesome that Bloomberg News has an investigation today showing how Chambers and Cisco have gamed the tax system to park $32 billion in profits in low-tax countries. We have several stories rolled...

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8. February 11, 2011 02:07 PM

   Amazon Bolts Texas’s “Unfavorable Regulatory Environment”

   But there's more to the story than we get from the AP and The Dallas Morning News

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Associated Press report that Amazon is closing its Texas warehouse due to—and this is a direct Amazon quote—the state's "unfavorable regulatory environment." That farcical statement, made by an exec in an email to employees leaked to the AP, shows how roguish the $85 billion corporation Amazon is when it comes to collecting sales taxes. The company—like other Internet and...

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9. September 6, 2011 02:37 PM

   Amazon’s California Tax Battle

   Fighting to delay the end of its unfair advantage

   By Ryan Chittum

   While billionaire Jeff Bezos is off crashing spaceships (or wannabe spaceships, anyway) in the West Texas desert, his company's unfair tax advantage is disintegrating too. In July, a new California law forced online retailers like Amazon to collect sales taxes if they have a physical presence in the state, but the Los Angeles Times reports that Amazon is still refusing...

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10. May 31, 2012 11:18 AM

    Amazon’s California tax squeeze

    A WSJ follow story waters down an LAT scoop from two weeks ago

    By Ryan Chittum

    Amazon's long run of not paying collecting state and local sales taxes is coming to an end as legislatures finally force the Internet retailer to compete on something of a level playing field with everyone else. But that doesn't mean the company isn't trying to squeeze every last drop out of the struggling communities whose infrastructure enables its profits. The...

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11. September 19, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: ‘makers and takers’ edition

    Romney's "47 percent" comment continues to reverberate

    By Ryan Chittum

    A big part of the problem with Mitt Romney's "47 percent" characterization, as I wrote yesterday, is that it uses federal income tax to snooker people not paying close attention into thinking half the country pays no taxes at all. That's cherry picking the most progressive part of the tax system to paint a picture of half a country of...

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12. May 16, 2011 08:25 PM

    Audit Notes: WSJ on Selling Access, Wall Street-Style; Yanked; Small Paywalls

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal has a very good page-one story on how Wall Street gives hedge funds access to key executives in exchange for their business. The lede is great: One day in early March, the phone lines of hedge-fund traders around London and New York suddenly lit up. A stock that many of them had placed hefty bets on—Pride...

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13. October 22, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: advising Obama, the leverage incentive, Jack Welch

    The NYT looks at the insider/outsider roles of Anita Dunn

    By Ryan Chittum

    The New York Times had an excellent story this weekend on Anita Dunn, the Obama adviser who's got one foot in the private sector and one in his presidential campaign: And working on behalf of Pratt & Whitney, a military contractor, SKDK told other consultants that the administration appeared unwilling to move aggressively to kill a deal forcing the company...

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14. May 11, 2012 07:34 PM

    Audit notes: Chesapeake woes, the Untaxable, Reuters on HSBC

    By Ryan Chittum

    The hits keep coming at Chesapeake Energy. Today, it's The Wall Street Journal's turn. It reports on page one that the company has put $1.4 billion in unreported liabilities off its balance sheet, far more than analysts had estimated. Most of these costs will hit this year and next, at a time when the company needs to raise substantial cash...

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15. May 15, 2012 11:15 PM

    Audit notes: Commercialization, GM and Facebook, Saverin’s taxes

    By Ryan Chittum

    Conor Friedersdorf makes a nice catch on Tom Friedman's Sunday column bemoaning the commercialization of seemingly all aspects of American life: For example, his column is bizarrely titled, "This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone," despite the fact that right above it on NYTimes.com there is a banner ad for a Citi/American Airlines credit card. But Friedersdorf says Friedman is...

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16. March 30, 2012 12:21 AM

    Audit Notes: Cookbooks and News, Too Big to Fail, Paul Ryan

    By Ryan Chittum

    Ken Doctor has a good post for Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab on why news organizations need to be ramping up niche product development, both for individual sale and as free add-ons to make digital subscriptions worth more. Let’s take one example. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe launched “Sunday Supper & More.” It’s a cookbook. It’s New England. And it could...

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17. November 4, 2010 04:40 PM

    Audit Notes: Derailed; Tax Know-Nothings, Press Bubble, Etc.

    By Ryan Chittum

    John Collins Rudolf writes at The New York Times's Green blog about the effect Tuesday's GOP landslide will have on the country's pitiful high-speed rail efforts. Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker promises, as he did in the campaign, that he'll turn down free federal money for a high-speed rail project in his state, a dumb move the LaCrosse Tribune points out...

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18. January 25, 2012 02:32 AM

    Audit Notes: Dimon the Persecuted, Mitt’s Taxes, Minimum Wage

    By Ryan Chittum

    Yesterday we heard press favorite Jamie Dimon sputtering about how swipe-fee regulations, which capped how much big banks could gouge merchants for debit-card transactions, were "a gross miscarriage of justice." Today, Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business sits down with Dimon and gets some nice quotes out of him on how Obama treats the "fat cats": "I've disagreed right from the...

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19. May 4, 2012 02:21 AM

    Audit notes: Dollar dictator, the SEC’s small fry, Americans go Swiss

    The Federal Reserve doesn't answer solely to Ben Bernanke

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Atlantic's Matthew O'Brien, whom you should really be reading, raises an important point lost in all the discussion about Ben Bernanke and whether he's doing enough to combat unemployment. Last Sunday in The New York Times Magazine, Paul Krugman showed how Chairman Bernanke's actions have been far less vigorous than Professor Bernanke would have advised. But the Fed Chairman...

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20. January 5, 2011 08:52 PM

    Audit Notes: Goldman and Facebook, Chainsaws, Hudson on Tax History

    By Ryan Chittum

    Francine McKenna sums up the problem with Facebook's Goldman Sachs investment pretty succinctly over at Forbes: Facebook wants the public’s money - and their trust - with none of the disclosure and none of the regulatory scrutiny of a public company. Goldman is getting around public disclosure rules that trigger when a company reaches 500 investors by creating a special-purpose...

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