Month: August 2014

by Dish Staff

Vauhini Vara contends that Burger King flirting with Canadian citizenship is about more than taxes:

If being based in Canada is more favorable, from a tax perspective, one might expect Tim Hortons to have a lower effective tax rate than Burger King. But, in fact, the individual companies have similar effective tax rates, of about twenty-seven per cent. Also, the tax inversions that the government is trying to avoid tend to involve large companies acquiring much smaller foreign ones, largely for the tax benefit of moving their headquarters. But while Americans might assume that Burger King is much larger than Tim Hortons, it’s not. Before news of the talks emerged, Tim Hortons was worth about eight billion dollars and Burger King around nine billion dollars; the combined company will do a significant portion of its business in Canada.

Jordan Weissmann differs:

[T]he idea that Burger King won’t really get any tax advantages out of relocating to Canada, where the corporate rate is about 15 percent compared with 35 percent in the U.S., seems transparently untrue.

Yes, it will continue paying American corporate rates on its U.S. profits, just like any other foreign company. But Canadian citizenship will likely give it more opportunities to use various accounting and business tricks to shift profits north of the border and out of the reach of the IRS (multinationals with foreign subsidiaries excel at that sort of thing).

However, McArdle sees “not much of an argument for global taxation”:

OK, yes, most people born and raised here were educated and provided various services by the government to get them to adulthood. But we’re overwhelmingly the largest net recipient of immigrants, and most of those people were educated and provided various services by their governments to get them to adulthood; we don’t seem to think there’s a problem with us free-riding on all those other nations. And surely there’s a statute of limitation on what you owe the government that raised you; 40 years later, should those expats still have to file insanely complicated returns to the IRS? Because that’s what we currently demand.

The argument is even weaker for corporate taxation; it boils down to “the police kept people from sacking your first headquarters, so therefore you owe us 35 percent of everything you make, forever.” Loan sharks and protection rackets offer more reasonable terms than this.

Barro weighs in:

As Matt Levine of Bloomberg notes, proposed legislation to prevent corporate inversions would not be likely to interfere with a Tim Hortons-Burger King merger, because this deal would pass the test those laws require: that the company is really, substantively shifting the locus of its operations outside the United States for reasons beyond taxes. We can change the tax code, but we can’t prevent an American fast-food company from going global.

by Bill McKibben

The NYT is out with a story today that the Obama administration is “devising” a politically ingenious strategy to get around the fact that no Senate in the foreseeable future will ever muster a 2/3 vote to approve an actual treaty on global warming. The story really isn’t news—everyone has known this for years, though the Times adds a little more detail about how such a scheme might work:

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their cuts.

If this sounds dubious to you, it will also sound dubious to those countries being hit hardest by climate change. At this point, however, the desperation of the rest of the world for any kind of leadership from the U.S. might convince them to cobble something together, especially since the French, who will have leadership of key negotiations in Paris in 2015, seem inclined to go along (they’re desperate not to come up empty, like the Danes after the Copenhagen climate fiasco):

There’s a strong understanding of the difficulties of the U.S. situation, and a willingness to work with the U.S. to get out of this impasse,” said Laurence Tubiana, the French ambassador for climate change to the United Nations.

The real questions, as always, will be less the form of any agreement than the content. The only concrete thing that international negotiators have ever agreed on is that the world can’t let the planet’s temperature rise more than two degrees Celsius. So far nothing that the US or most other nations have proposed would get us there—we’re solidly on track for four or five degrees. Unless the Obama administration sends a sharp signal that it wants serious–as opposed to face-saving—action, that course is unlikely to change. Keep an eye on that two-degree figure, and on the Keystone Pipeline, a bellwether for whether they’re willing to suffer any political pain.

(Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)

by Dish Staff

Who’da thunk it?

Past research has indicated that couples who abuse substances are at a greater risk for divorce, in part because substance abuse often leads to an increase in domestic violence. However, new research has found that when it comes to marijuana use, the opposite effect occurs: couples who frequently use marijuana are actually at a lower risk of partner violence.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown parses this research:

Obviously this doesn’t mean marijuana makes people less violent per se—maybe the types prone to pot-smoking are just inherently less violent individuals; or perhaps the types prone to partner violence are categorically less drawn to the drug. But it is interesting to contrast these stats with numbers on alcohol, which has frequently been linked to increased incidences of partner violence.

In one recent study, published in the journal Addictive Behaviors in January 2014, researchers found that “on any alcohol use days, heavy alcohol use days (five or more standard drinks), and as the number of drinks increased on a given day, the odds of physical and sexual aggression perpetration” by college-age men in relationships increased.

Christopher Ingraham looks at who paid for the study:

Perhaps most significantly, the Buffalo study was funded partially by a grant from the National Institute for Drug Abuse. Marijuana reformers have strongly criticized NIDA’s institutional biases against marijuana legalization in the past, including restrictions the agency has placed on the availability of marijuana for research purposes. But the fact that NIDA is funding studies like this one suggests that it, like much of the country, is beginning to change its tune.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Lena Dunham was an anxious child:

My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my many terrors. I wonder if this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning. Playing with my friend Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a sleepover just before bedtime.

One night, my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he takes a walk and doesn’t come back for three hours. While he’s gone, I start to plan our life without him. …

In our first session, Lisa sits on the floor with me, her legs tucked under her like she’s just a friend who has come by to hang out. She looks like the mom on a television show, with big curly hair and a silky blouse. She asks me how old I am, and I respond by asking her how old she is—after all, we’re sitting on the floor together. “Thirty-four,” she says. My mother was thirty-six when I was born. Lisa is different from my mother in lots of ways, starting with her clothes: a suit, sheer tights, and black high heels. Different from my mother, who looks like her normal self when she dresses as a witch for Halloween.

Lisa lets me ask her whatever I want. She has two daughters. She lives uptown. She’s Jewish. Her middle name is Robin, and her favorite food is cereal. By the time I leave, I think that she can fix me.

The difference between Dunham’s childhood fears and everyone else’s is, in part, that hers were met with old-time New York therapy sessions out of a New Yorker cartoon and are… now featured in the New Yorker.

Which brings us to another issue, namely the anxieties Dunham herself inspires in a certain segment of the population. That segment being, I suppose, those who feel that all of life’s unfairnesses can be summed up in the fact of Dunham’s success. It’s a bit like how, for committed anti-Semites, every last one of the world’s problems can be blamed on Jews, with the crucial difference being that Dunham has – as far as I can tell – shrewdly incorporated these perceptions into her act. Many before her have passively resigned themselves to being the face of ‘privilege’; Dunham’s innovation is to not merely own it (as someone like Gwyneth Paltrow does) but go with it.

One can never just appreciate a cultural product Lena Dunham has created. One must always defend doing so, in anticipation of the ‘but-all-that-privilege’ detractors. The latest – and possibly strongest – apology comes from Jacob Clifton, who hones in on the key issue in his response to the essay:

We have a propensity for taking women, young women especially, at face value. Young women are not alone here: Dave Chapelle quit comedy when he realized the racists weren’t laughing with him, but at him; Kurt Cobain killed himself in part because his rapist fans were winning. I get infinitely more laughs with jokes about theater than I do about football. Taylor Swift continues writing singles about the haters because we’ve convinced ourselves that she isn’t making conscious choices to write about love, an abiding subject in poetry for a while now, but in fact just writing her diary for our consumption.

Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash: Those are artists, because their experience—of white heterosexual masculinity—is after all universal. Everybody can identify with the love of a good woman, the vicissitudes that attain thereof, but nobody wants to hear about some dumb white girl getting dumped. …

Reading this first excerpt of Lena Dunham’s forthcoming book, preceded as it has been by a year’s worth of death knells and straight-up unadorned hating, I was irritated. Of course I was; it’s irritating as hell. But the funniest and loveliest thing about Dunham has always been, to me, the deadpan irony of exactly those choices. Tiny Furniture is every bit as self-excoriating as the first season of Girls was, and just as confusing for those of us (most of us) who find it hard to switch gears, to hear that register at all: The one where a woman telling you the worst things about herself is an attempt to bridge the gap, to create art that transcends selves, rather than to simply confess.