Tag: news

Speaking as someone who has eaten there,
Burger King is one of the saddest places on earth. Abandon
digestion and pimple-free skin, all ye who enter there. To me,
Burger King isn’t just a lousy place to eat but a sort of
existential black site that drains the life out of you (well, me)
on every level: All the products are just lousier versions than
what’s offered at better fast-food joints. The ads, even those old
fake-hip ones with the weird Burger King, are awful to the nth
degree (anyone else remember the
“Where’s Herb?” campaign?).

Yet I find the attacks on Burger King’s purchase of Tim Horton’s
“Cafe & Bake Shop” even more saddening. By picking up
the Canadian-owned maker of the terribly-named “Timbits”
(donut holes named after the hockey player and drunk-driving
cautionary tale who co-founded the chain), Burger King can
escape U.S. corporate taxes that are much higher than those in most
other countries. This is the so-called
tax inversion process, by which a U.S. company picks up a
foreign one and then moves its corporate headquarters there to take
advantage of lower taxes.
“Voila, higher profits!” clucks The Daily Beast‘s
Daniel Gross. The Department of Treasury estimates that
over the next decade such inversions could mean a loss of $20
billion in corporate taxes. To put even that self-evidently puny
amount in even clearer context, the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) figures the corporate income taxe will raise $4.5 trillion
over the same period. “In other words,”
notes Kyle Pomereau of the Tax Foundation, “corporate
inversions are predicted to cost 0.5 percent of the corporate tax
base over ten years.”

The White House and a number of Democrats are
trying to stymie tax inversions through legislation and
the bully pulpit.
Just earlier this month, President Obama floated the idea of an
administrative action that could spike such deals and he’s blasted
tax inversions as “unpatriotic.”

But this is all b.s. until the U.S. gets its corporate tax
rate into line with what other countries are charging. According to
KPMG, which has a comprehensive chart of corporate tax rates
(including average state and regional rates), the U.S. total comes
to 40 percent. Canada’s comes to just 26.5 percent:

The corporate income tax rate is 26.5%. It comprises a
15.0% federal tax component and an 11.5% provincial tax component.
Depending on the province, the combined general corporate income
tax rate ranges from 25% to 31%. Lower corporate income tax rates
are available to Canadian-controlled private corporations (CCPCs)
on their first CAD$500,000 (CAN$350,000 to CAD$425,000 for certain
provinces) of taxable active business income. A 2014 representative
tax rate for a CCPC on its first CAD$500,000 of active business
income is 15.5% (an 11% federal tax component and a 4.5% provincial
tax component). Depending on the province, the 2014 combined active
business income tax rate ranges from 11% to 19%.

Read more, including a breakdown of the U.S. figure, here.
There’s no shame or infamy in moving to where conditions are
better, whether for your family, your job, or your business. Such
freedom of mobility is, in fact, typically celebrated as one of the
things that makes America exceptional. And it goes without saying
that since tax inversions are perfectly legal, there’s not even a
hint of impropriety here.

As Gross points out in The Daily Beast, Burger
King won’t save its corporate skin simply by shuffling off to
Canada. It’s a poorly run company and it’s really kind of a miracle
it’s lasted as long as it has (did I mention how sad-inducing BK
is?). But for god’s sake, are Democrats and other economic
nativists really so dumb as to think they can gain ground in a
global economy by making it harder for all businesses to do
business in America (whether through higher taxes or ownership
rules or other regulations)? That way madness lies—and continued
economic lassitude.

Local police departments aren’t the only
authorities arming themselves to the teeth with ex-military stuff.
As
Politico notes, campus cops at universities all over the
country are also receiving re-purposed combat equipment:

Florida International University campus police have
military-grade rifles. Ohio State has a
Mine Resistant Ambush Protection vehicle. And Florida State has
a brand new Army Humvee. These Pentagon hand-me-downs are just a
few examples of the militarization of local police that has
extended to college campuses — raising fresh questions about
exactly why police departments would need such defense-grade
hardware. …

Most items distributed through the Defense Logistics Agency’s
Law Enforcement Support Office go to state and municipal government
agencies. But a recent Freedom of Information Act request
by MuckRock revealed
that more than 100
college campuses with sworn-in police departments also
participate in the 1033
program as of last December.

The institutions include community colleges, large research
universities, liberal arts campuses and entire college systems.

It’s not all armored cars and crowd-suppression
gas—some colleges have received furniture and office supplies from
the federal program that distributes the goods. Even so, why does
OSU need an armored car? OSU football fans are a crazy bunch, but
still.

The average college town probably doesn’t have quite as fraught
a relationship between cop and citizen as does Ferguson,
Missouri. But students also endure unjust police encounters all
the time. The kind of extreme incident for which campus cops claim
they need military equipment—an active shooter, for instance—is
extremely rare. Over-aggressive campus policing, on the other hand,
is not.

If colleges really wanted to protect students lives and their
rights, they would require their police forces to wear cameras. But
as University of Florida Dean of Students Jen Day Shaw told
Politico, that doesn’t seem to be a top priority:

But those questions are more about creating a welcoming
environment for students and how campus cops can use existing
technology in the best way possible — for example, should police
have on-person cameras that record confrontations with
students?

“I’m not hearing a lot of the anti-police buzz,” Shaw said.
“We’re really focusing more on the educational side of things.”

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) yesterday signed
into law a cellphone “kill switch” bill that The Week

describes as “the first law of its kind in the country.”

The bill requires that smartphones sold in the state beginning
July 2015 be equipped with an anti-theft “kill switch” that can
remotely render the device inoperable if stolen.

S.B.
962, which was introduced by Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco)
and passed 28-8 earlier this month, is unique among state-level
kill switch bills, because it “requires that the phones come with
the kill switch feature set to enabled under the default settings.
Consumers would have to change the setting to disable the feature
if they don’t want the protection,”
explains the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I think as any number of issues here in California, when we act
it becomes the de facto way business is done across the
country,” says Leno,
who believes that his bill will help end the “epidemic”
of smartphone thefts. “About 3.1 million American consumers were
victims of smart phone theft in 2013,” according to
Consumer Reports. That’s a lot, but not that much in the grand
scheme of things. There are an estimated 327,577,529 mobile
phones (not even counting the other
mobile devices) in use in the U.S., which is more phones than
citizens.

The state stands to make some cash by passing the law. One
provision declares that “the knowing retail sale of a smartphone in
California in violation of [the law] may be subject to a civil
penalty of not less than five hundred dollars ($500), nor more than
two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), per smartphone sold in
California in violation.”

Although it seems like a step forward now, legislation moves at
a much slower pace than technology, so S.B. 962 regulations may be
holding back future innovations by the time the ink dries. The
cellphone industry isn’t opposed to anti-theft tools;
there exist plenty
of them already.

“Today’s action was unnecessary given the breadth of action the
industry has taken,” a representative from the Cellular
Telecommunications Industry Associated (CTIA) said
yesterday. When the bill was approved by the state senate, the
CTIA issued a
statement in opposition, noting some foreseeable downsides:

We urge the Governor to not sign this bill, since uniformity in
the wireless industry created tremendous benefits for wireless
consumers, including lower costs and phenomenal innovation. State
by state technology mandates, such as this one, stifle those
benefits and are detrimental to wireless consumers.

New York, Illinois, and Rhode Island are considering kill switch
bills, and Minnesota passed one this year.

No state fared worse during the launch of
Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges than Oregon. The Beaver
State was the first to announce a major delay in opening its online
insurance portal, and the technology for the project—a $240 million
project heavily funded through federal grants—never worked.

Earlier this year the state announced that it was scrapping the
project in order to join the federal exchange.

What was intended to be one of Obamacare’s biggest, boldest
state-run exchanges, a model for the nation, turned out to be one
of its most spectacular failures. Now the state and its contractor
are both trying to weasel out of responsibility—by blaming it on
the other guy, writes Peter Suderman.

View this article.

A terrible state law in
California appears to be failing and we may have … unions … to
thank. Hey, we’re libertarians. We take allies wherever we can get
them.

Yesterday a proposed statewide ban on single-use plastic bags
(grocery stores and the like) failed to get enough votes in the
state’s Assembly. As the
Sacramento Bee reports, banners lost support because
of their proposed alternative—paper bags for 10 cents each. That
money would go to the grocery stores’ revenue. So liberty may
benefit from a union’s instinctive opposition to anything that
causes their employers to earn more of a profit:

A key organized labor group removed its support and went
neutral, which helped plastic and paper industries opposed to the
bill. In a key late change, the United Food and Commercial Workers
Union – grocery store workers – aligned with skeptics denouncing a
minimum 10-cent fee stores could charge at checkout counters for
paper or reusable bags. …

“This legislation creates a heavy financial burden on consumers
and forces consumers to essentially decide how they would like to
be taxed,” said Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Marysville. “They can
either purchase a reusable bag to take to the store with them or
they can spend 10 cents for every recycled bag they get at the
store.”

Republicans were not alone in voicing those reservations.
Multiple Democrats rose to say the fee would burden consumers, and
several voted no or abstained.

“To charge for a bag that’s been given free as a part of doing
business, I don’t think is the way to go,” said Assemblywoman
Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernardino.

Disappontingly, the Bee simply allows supporters of the
legislation to assert that the ban helps the environment without
providing any actual evidence. In June, the Reason Foundation
explored many of the claims that plastic bags were a significant
source of litter and that plastic bag bans actually accomplish
anything other than burdening the poor even further and found the
claims wanting. Read more
of their research here.

The bill is not formally dead yet. They have until the end of
the week to try to get it passed.

Those of us in Los Angeles (and many other California
municipalities) are still hosed, though, as our local bans remain
intact. Here’s Reason TV and Kennedy on the crafting of the Los
Angeles ban:

Every generation gets more
than its fair share of curious scrutiny. Who are these kids who
will inherit the heirlooms and, just maybe, learn from our
screw-ups? Each rising cohort finds its own way—not just as a
group, but as the individuals that make it up—and oldsters want to
know if their values will be reflected or rejected, and if the
newbies are up to the challenge.

What challenge? Well, we all leave a bit of a mess behind us.
Somebody has to figure out what the hell grandpa did with the
checkbook. And will nobody put an end to the plague of baggy cargo
shorts worn with wifebeater t-shirts?

But the kids are all right. They’re just fine—not perfect, but
getting along in their own way. And that way is pretty heavily
disconnected from old loyalties and affiliations.

Come along with Reason as we take a long look at
millennials.

View this article.

If you’re in the
D.C. area, come out to this event tonight at Reason’s DC HQ, from 6
to 8pm.

Drinks and light snacks will be served. Event is free
and open to the public, but
you must RSVP.

Born between 1980 and 2000, the millennial generation dwarfs
even the baby-boom generation in numbers and is already
fundamentally remaking American politics, culture, and
business.

Millennials are widely credited with handing Barack Obama a
second term as president, with being socially tolerant and
skeptical of government invasions of privacy and personal freedoms,
and creating world-changing companies such as Facebook.

Millennials also display an admirable independent streak, with
fully one-third refusing to identify as either Democrat or
Republican. They are the politically unclaimed generation and how
they define their relationship to power will define the next 50
years or more of American life.

The October issue of Reason is devoted to millennials and
features articles discussing the rise of “the Hipster Capitalist,”
the increasingly desperate scramble among parties for the youth
vote, the millennial fondness for dystopian fiction and movies such
as The Hunger Games and Divergent, and the new language of politics
spoken by today’s post-partisan youth. This special issue of Reason
follows the release of this summer’s Reason-Rupe Poll of
millennials that was widely discussed in The New York Times
Magazine, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.

You’re invited to join Reason.com’s Nick Gillespie and Reason
Foundation Polling Director Emily Ekins for a fast-paced,
wide-ranging discussion about millennials, what they believe, and
how libertarians interested in promoting “free minds and free
markets” might best with today’s younger generation.

Light snacks, beer, wine, and soft drinks will be served.

Tuesday, August 26
6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Reason DC HQ
1747 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20007

RSVP HERE

Map: http://goo.gl/maps/Xt0Fc

Questions? Contact Cynthia Bell at cynthia.bell@reason.org
or 202-986-0916