Archive for February 2018
“It’s always a lot of fun when you win”*…
Fans of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 have excitedly proclaimed that it will release the “Animal Spirits” of the American economy, hailing it as a spur to investment and a boon to workers. But as CNN points out:
The White House has celebrated the tax cut bonuses unveiled by the likes of Walmart, Bank of America, and Disney.
Yet shareholders, not workers, are far bigger direct winners from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
American companies have lavished Wall Street with $171 billion of stock buyback announcements so far this year, according to research firm Birinyi Associates. That’s a record-high for this point of the year and more than double the $76 billion that Corporate America disclosed at the same point of 2017…
The amount of money allocated so far on bonuses and wage hikes pales in comparison with Wall Street’s buyback bonanza.
S&P 500 companies have devoted about $5.6 billion to bonuses and wage hikes because of the tax law, according to research from academics Rick Wartzman and William Lazonick as well as the Academic-Industry Research Network. The group added up commitments from the 50 companies in the S&P 500 that had announced plans to reward workers through February 15.
Indeed, as Marketwatch reports,
A report by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt [finds] that 83% of large companies don’t expect the tax cut to boost salaries at all — just help pay for small bonuses companies like WalMart and AT&T gave workers, which reporters soon discovered were, themselves, skewed toward higher-paid, longer-tenured employees in many cases…
And perhaps more fundamentally alarming, the proposed boost that the tax act was supposed to provide to corporate investment– to America’s long-term competitiveness and to the creation of new jobs– seems stuck in the gate; as Marketwatch continues:
Goldman finds companies have raised guidance on re-investment in their businesses — the putative reason for cutting corporate taxes at all — only 3%…
…which, given Census Bureau tabulations of past capital expense, would be about $30 Billion– well under 20% of the buy-back activity planned (so far).
Stock buy-backs have played a powerful role in the performance of the stock markets– which President Trump often conflates with the performance of the economy as a whole– over the last several years; the Financial Times observes:
Corporate share repurchases have been a powerful driver of the US equity market’s post-crisis recovery and subsequent climb to record highs last month. US companies have bought back about $3.5tn since 2010. Throw in nearly $2tn of dividends and the overall handout to shareholders has been much greater than the Fed’s entire quantitative easing programme. Buybacks started to slow down last year, but there are signs that investors can still count on Corporate America. In fact, companies’ purchases of their own shares appear to have played a role in reversing the recent stock market swoon…
As the FT points out, while this is a boon to equity investors, it “may be bad news for hopes of an investment-fueled economic boom.”
Indeed. (See also: “Confidence Tricks“)
* President Donald J. Trump, on the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017
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As we wonder about the equity in equities, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Paul Robin Krugman; he was born on this date in 1953. A Nobel laureate in economics (for his work in the dynamics of international trade), he is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. But he is much more widely known as a columnist for the New York Times, where he wrote (on November 27, 2017) a piece on the then-pending tax bill: “The Biggest Tax Scam in History.”
“No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side”*…
Lucas Cranach the Elder: Martin Luther, circa 1532; Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait of Erasmus, 1523
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the leading figure of the Northern Renaissance, is widely considered the greatest of early humanists. Five hundred years ago, he faced a populist uprising led by a powerful provocateur, Martin Luther, that resulted in divisions no less explosive than those we see in America and Europe today.
Between 1500 and 1515, Erasmus produced a small library of tracts, textbooks, essays, and dialogues that together offered a blueprint for a new Europe. The old Europe had been dominated by the Roman Church. It emphasized hierarchy, authority, tradition, and the performance of rituals like confession and taking communion. But a new order was emerging, marked by spreading literacy, expanding trade, growing cities, the birth of printing, and the rise of a new middle class intent on becoming not only prosperous but learned, too.
Erasmus became the most articulate spokesman for this class…
Around the same time that the Erasmians were celebrating the dawn of a new enlightened era, a very different movement was gathering in support of Martin Luther. An Augustinian friar then in his early thirties, Luther had developed his own, unique gospel, founded on the principle of faith. Man, he thought, can win divine grace not through doing good works, as the Latin Church taught, but through belief in Christ. No matter how sincerely one confessed, no matter how many alms one gave, without faith in the Savior, he reasoned, no one can be saved. When Luther made this “discovery,” in around 1515, he felt that he had become “altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”…
Initially, Luther admired Erasmus and his efforts to reform the Church, but over time Luther’s inflammatory language and his stress on faith instead of good works led to a painful separation. The flashpoint was the debate over whether man has free will. In dueling tracts, Erasmus suggested that he does, while Luther vehemently objected; after that, the two men considered each other mortal enemies.
Beyond that immediate matter of dispute, however, their conflict represented the clash of two contrasting world views—those of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side, but Erasmus’s reformist and universalist creed could not match Luther’s more emotional and nationalistic one; even some of Erasmus’s closest disciples eventually defected to Luther’s camp. Erasmus became an increasingly marginal figure, scorned by both Catholics, for being too critical of the Church, and Lutherans, for being too timid. In a turbulent and polarized age, he was the archetypal reasonable liberal…
As Mark Twain is reputed to have observed, “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”– the Renaissance vs. the Reformation: “Luther vs. Erasmus: When Populism First Eclipsed the Liberal Elite.”
* Desiderius Erasmus, The Alchymyst, in Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I
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As we celebrate critical thinking, we might recall that it was on this date in 380 that the three Emperors of the Roman Empire issued the Edict of Thessalonica, ordering all subjects of the Empire to profess the faith of the bishops of Rome and of Alexandria, making Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire and effectively creating “Christendom.” It ended a period of religious tolerance that had been formalized in 313 when the emperor Constantine I, together with his eastern counterpart Licinius, had issued the Edict of Milan, which granted religious toleration and freedom for persecuted Christians.
“That’s the place to get to—nowhere”*…
In a triumph of data collection and analysis, a team of researchers based at Oxford University has built the tools necessary to calculate how far any dot on a map is from a city — or anything else.
The research, published in Nature last month, allows us to pin down a question that has long evaded serious answers: Where is the middle of nowhere?
To know, you’d have to catalogue and calculate the navigation challenges presented by the planet’s complex, varied terrain and the dirt tracks, roads, railroads and waterways that crisscross it. You’d then need to string those calculations together, testing every possible path from every point to every other point.
That is pretty much what the folks did at the Malaria Atlas Project, a group at Oxford’s Big Data Institute that studies the intersection of disease, geography and demographics. The huge team — 22 authors are credited — spent years building a globe-spanning map outlining just how long it takes to cross any spot on the planet based on its transportation types, vegetation, slope, elevation and more. Those spots, or pixels, represent about a square kilometer.
Armed with this data, and hours and hours of computer time, The Washington Post processed every pixel and every populated place in the contiguous United States to find the one that best represents the “middle of nowhere.”
Congratulations, Glasgow, Mont.!
Of all towns with more than 1,000 residents, Glasgow, home to 3,363 people in the rolling prairie of northeastern Montana, is farthest — about 4.5 hours in any direction — from any metropolitan area of more than 75,000 people…
Remoteness, ranked– see the runners-up and the contenders in other categories at “Using the best data possible, we set out to find the middle of nowhere.”
* D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
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As we idolize isolation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1815 that Napoleon, who had been banished to France’s “middle of nowhere,” escaped from Elba. With 700 men, he sailed back to France.
The 5th Regiment was sent to intercept him and made contact just south of Grenoble on 7 March 1815. Napoleon approached the regiment alone, dismounted his horse and, when he was within gunshot range, shouted to the soldiers, “Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish”. The soldiers quickly responded with, “Vive L’Empereur!” Ney, who had boasted to the restored Bourbon king, Louis XVIII, that he would bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage, affectionately kissed his former emperor and forgot his oath of allegiance to the Bourbon monarch. The two then marched together towards Paris with a growing army. The unpopular Louis XVIII fled to Belgium after realizing he had little political support. On 13 March, the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared Napoleon an outlaw. Four days later, Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia each pledged to put 150,000 men into the field to end his rule… [source]
So began the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s second reign, at the end of which (on the 22nd of June) he abdicated.
Napoleon returned from Elba, by Karl Stenben, 19th century
“Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it”*…
John Stuart Mill, the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century, is today best remembered as the author of On Liberty… in which he argues, relentlessly and over the course of around 50,000 words, that there should be no interference with the thought, speech, or action of any individual except on the grounds of the prevention of harm to others. That prohibition applies to legislative or state action, but also to those informal modes of coercion that can be practised by society itself. And the ban is total. “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” Though occasionally challenged by the collectivist left, the position Mill argues for has become orthodoxy in modern Anglo-American political thought.
But while liberalism itself remains pre-eminent, Mill’s arguments for that position have fallen out of sight in recent discussions. In contrast to many contemporary thinkers, Mill’s defence of liberal principles is historical and local – not abstract and universal…
Part of a wonderful series in the Times Literary Supplement, Footnotes to Plato— an appreciation of the relevance of Mill’s thought in our time: “John Stuart Mill: higher happiness.”
* John Stuart Mill, “The Spirit of the Age, I”
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As we get in touch with our inner Utilitarian, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that the “temporary insanity” defense was first successfully deployed in the U.S., when it was used as a plea by U.S. Congressman Daniel Sickles of New York in his trial for the shooting of his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key— for which Sickles was acquitted, though he’d been witnessed executing his rival and had confessed. Sickles went on to serve as Sheriff in New York in 1890.
source (and larger image)
“The gods too are fond of a joke”*…
The monthly Fun-Master newsletter, which cost a few dollars per issue, contained sometimes as many as 20 pages of jokes, broken up into subsections such as “Stories,” “Insults—Squelches—Sarcasm,” and “Humorous Views of the News.” The jokes and gags within ran the gamut from cleverly convoluted yarns to snappy one-liners:
“I know a Texan who rides on a solid gold saddle. Every time he hits a bump, he strikes it rich!”
“Last week I played golf on a real crummy golf course. It had holes in it!”
“He’s a real hypochondriac. When he goes to a cocktail party, he stirs his drink with a thermometer!”
Thanks to Glason’s constant back-page advertising, the newsletter became a well-known industry resource. Famous comedians including Flip Wilson, Dick Gregory, Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson reportedly subscribed, or otherwise got jokes and training from Glason—even if not all of them wanted to admit it. “Jackie Gleason didn’t want to be on record as buying the Billy Glason gag files, so he had his writer, Harry Crane, buy them”… “It was the writer who bought them, but it was Jackie Gleason who ended up with them.”…
It wasn’t only comedians who took advantage of Glason’s jokes. The newsletter was also bought by ventriloquists, DJs, and magicians. Anybody who needed some jokes in their act.
The Fun-Master newsletters were also often representative of the comedy of the day, for better and for worse. Jokes about nagging, controlling wives—or marriage as a prison sentence for men—abound, along with a number of ethnic stereotypes… At the same time, during his career, Glason maintained a staunch insistence on working clean. “It used to really make him angry when people used profanity for the sake of getting a shock laugh”…
The remarkable story of Billy Glason and his “Fun-Master Gag Files,” which influenced the joke industry– and indeed, comedy at large, for decades: “Rediscovering the Newsletter That Inspired a Generation of Comedians.”
* Aristotle
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As we ponder punch lines, we might spare a thought for Henry “Henny” Youngman; he died on this date in 1998. A comedian (and violinist), he was crowned by Walter Winchell “The King of the One-Liner.” At a time when many comedians told elaborate anecdotes, Youngman’s routine consisted of telling simple one-liner jokes (of the sort in which Glason traded), occasionally with interludes of violin; a typical Youngman stage performance lasted only 15 to 20 minutes but contained dozens of jokes in rapid-fire succession. He’s perhaps best remembered for the gag that became his trademark: “Take my wife … please.”
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