It’s Good to Remember — We Are All On Borrowed Time

WaPo Op-Ed: It’s Good to Remember — We Are All On Borrowed Time

Conducting its audit of Aegean’s 2016 results, PwC sent staff to verify the existence of four important customers and found that one address did not exist and two were residential buildings with no businesses located there — but it still signed off on the financial statements.

Accounting firms hit with record US fines over audit failures

Ultrawealthy charities that are helping no one and report nothing cost U.S. taxpayers billions every year, report says Fortune (ma). Of course they help someone! The employees, who are almost certainly family members.

Corporate taxes matter, incentives matter, but does economics matter?

by  Tyler Cowen 

This paper combines administrative tax data and a model of global investment behavior to evaluate the investment and firm valuation effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017, the largest corporate tax reduction in the history of the United States. We extend the canonical model of Hall and Jorgenson (1967) to a multinational setting in which a firm produces in domestic and international locations. We use the model to characterize and measure four determinants of domestic investment: domestic and foreign marginal tax rates and cost-of-capital subsidies. We estimate elasticities of domestic investment with respect to each and use them to identify the structural parameters of our model, to quantify which parts of the reform mattered most to investment, and to conduct policy counterfactuals. We have five main findings. First, the TCJA caused domestic investment of firms with the mean tax change to increase by roughly 20% relative to firms experiencing no tax change. Second, the TCJA created large incentives for some U.S. multinationals to increase foreign capital, which rose substantially following the law change. Third, domestic investment also increases in response to foreign incentives, indicating complementarity between domestic and foreign capital in production. Fourth, the general equilibrium long-run effects of the TCJA on the domestic and total capital of U.S. firms are around 6% and 9%, respectively. Finally, in our model, the dynamic labor and corporate tax revenue feedback in the first 10 years is less than 2% of baseline corporate revenue, as investment growth causes both higher labor tax revenues from wage growth and offsetting corporate revenue declines from more depreciation deductions. Consequently, the fall in total corporate tax revenue from the tax cut is close to the static effect.

That is from a new NBER paper by Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Matthew Smith, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick.  How many times has the NYT told you otherwise?  As I’ve noted in blog posts over the last six years or so, the standard literature already was indicating that such tax cuts are relatively effective (though no panaceas).  I hope this settles the matter, though I fear it will not…

Via Jason Furman, who also reproduces some nice pictures from the piece.

McBride Trial Tests Australian JusticeConsortium News

Planting Trillions of Trees Won’t Save the Planet. Here’s a Better Way The Messenger 

Lawmakers Say FBI Can Keep Its Prized Surveillance Tool, but It’ll Need a WarrantGizmodo

Portuguese prosecutors reportedly mistranscribed wiretaps that implicated PM in corruption scandal Euronews

 

With AI, Big Tech is No Longer Pretending to Care Illusion of More 

 

Google researchers deal a major blow to the theory AI is about to outsmart humans Business Insider 

 

Training of 1-Trillion Parameter Scientific AI Begins HPC

 

Microsoft and Nvidia Are Making It Easier To Run AI Models on Windows The Verge

 

AI chemist finds molecule to make oxygen on Mars after sifting through millions Space (furzy). I do not like the personalizing of the AI in the headline. 

The 10 Rules of Being Human

Kottke: “A few decades ago, Chérie Carter-Scott devised a list of 10 Rules for Being Human, which was published in her 1998 book If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules. These rules are often presented on social media as being “handed down from ancient Sanskrit” but their more recent origin shouldn’t keep us from learning what we can from them. Here they are:

• You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.
• You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called ‘life.’ Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.
• There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.
• A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.
• Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
• “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain a “there” that will look better to you than your present “here”.
• Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.
• What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.
• Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
• You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unraveling the double helix of inner knowing.”