The New York Times: “A Tax Overhaul would be Great in Theory. Here’s why it’s so hard in Practice”

A short list of the plan’s potential benefits looks awesome: It would give companies more incentive to keep jobs in the United States, less to overextend themselves on borrowed money and provide vast savings by reducing what companies spend on tax lawyers, who help them game the current system.

Yet these changes could also set off a cascade of more harmful effects. The plan could shift trillions of dollars of wealth from Americans to foreigners; set off an emerging markets financial crisis; wreak havoc in global oil markets; and cause sustained harm to the American higher education and tourism industries (including, as it happens, luxury hotels with President Trump’s name on them).

Neil Irwin

Long story short: you can’t radically change the tax system of the world’s biggest economy (and home to the largest multinational companies) without huge repercussions everywhere.

Flickr Blog: “Happy 13th Birthday, Flickr!”

It’s official, Flickr is a teenager! Thirteen years young and just as full of wonder, snark, and creativity as we’ve ever been. Together with our phenomenal community of photographers from around the world, our Flickr Family, we’ve set the tone for what an online photographer’s space could be.

Zee Jenkins

With the trouble their parent company Yahoo is going through, I would be grateful if Flickr just manages to grow old by another year. There are encouraging signs, with Flickr recently integrated more deeply into other Yahoo products, such as mail, but the bigger problem is how Yahoo will survive – or will the company end up being sold for parts.

The Guardian: “The ruthlessly effective rebranding of Europe’s new far right”

This nostalgia has an unmistakable appeal, but not necessarily for the sort of voters one might expect. Whereas young Britons overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU and the elderly voted to leave, in France it is the opposite. According to Julian Rochedy, the former FN youth leader, appeals to nostalgia work better with the young in France – who dream of an era they never witnessed – than with the old, who lived through the era Marine Le Pen promises to restore. It is older voters, Rochedy argues, who are the greatest obstacle to Le Pen’s victory. They are afraid of leaving the euro, he says. They are afraid of huge changes. Rochedy is convinced that the FN will never win simply by fetishising the past. They just want to go back 30 years, he said of his erstwhile colleagues. It’s a discourse that doesn’t at all take into account the world as it is and what France has become.

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By framing its anti-migrant politics as a battle against imperious elites and political correctness, the PVV has been able to capitalise on a panoply of grievances, from anger over asylum seekers to Euroscepticism. Meanwhile, many causes of the radical left – including anti-racism and anti-colonialism – have now become establishment thinking in the Netherlands. Idealism has been bureaucratised, argues the journalist Bas Heijne, who writes a column in the liberal daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad. And when the establishment enforces universalism, you react against it. That’s why there is such a strong anti-PC tone to the Dutch right: do not tell us what to say, what to celebrate and who we must live next to.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Remarkably similar to Trump’s tactics in the US – and just as dangerous. If I remember my German history lessons correctly, Hitler also played this ‘normalization’ card until he seized power, and we all know how well that turned out for Europe and the world.

The Guardian: “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy”

Trump’s incessant repetition of the phrase has led many writers since the election to argue that the secret to his victory was a backlash against excessive “political correctness”. Some have argued that Hillary Clinton failed because she was too invested in that close relative of political correctness, “identity politics”. But upon closer examination, “political correctness” becomes an impossibly slippery concept. The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would have called an “exonym”: a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it. Nobody ever describes themselves as “politically correct”. The phrase is only ever an accusation.

If you say that something is technically correct, you are suggesting that it is wrong – the adverb before “correct” implies a “but”. However, to say that a statement is politically correct hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting in bad faith. He or she has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral superiority. To say that someone is being “politically correct” discredits them twice. First, they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know it.

Moira Weigel

One might say Donald Trump is ‘politically correct’ only to himself – i.e. proclaiming he’s a good leader for America and calling everybody disagreeing wrong and ‘sad’. Although on second thought I’m not sure it applies, because he sure seems to believe all the crazy, untrue things he constantly spouts.

Lawfare: “It’s Not Foreigners who are plotting here: What the Data really show”

Since January 2015, the FBI has also arrested more anti-immigrant American citizens plotting violent attacks on Muslims within the U.S. than it has refugees, or former refugees, from any banned country. As we wrote about here, here and here, in October 2016, three white men from Kansas were charged with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. According to the graphic complaint, the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant men planned to attack a mosque in the area. The men progressed quickly with their plot, amassing firearms and explosives. The targets were people from Somalia, who ironically, would now be covered by Trump’s order.

And finally during the two years of arrests I studied, the FBI arrested six U.S. citizens en route to Istanbul, who planned to travel on to Syria to join ISIL. In other words, there are more U.S. citizens arrested while leaving the United States to commit mayhem abroad, transiting through Istanbul alone, than there are refugees trying to sneak into the country to perpetrate violence here.

Nora Ellingsen

It’s almost like Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is trying to protect Muslims from coming to the US, where they could be targeted by aggressive local extremists.

The New York Times: “‘A Conservative Climate Solution’: Republican Group calls for Carbon Tax”

In an interview, Mr. Baker said that the plan followed classic conservative principles of free-market solutions and small government. He suggested that even former President Ronald Reagan would have blessed the plan: I’m not at all sure the Gipper wouldn’t have been very happy with this. He said he had no idea how the proposal would be received by the current White House or Congress.

A carbon tax, which depends on rising prices of fossil fuels to reduce consumption, is supported in general by many Democrats, including Al Gore. Major oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, have come out in favor of the concept as well.

John Schwartz

Meanwhile, Trump’s proposed energy plan focuses on fossil fuels, especially coal mining, completely ignoring renewable energy, so my guess is there’s zero chance for this proposal to be implemented during his administration.

AVC: “The Future of Labor”

I don’t think all the work opportunities will be gone in fifty years. But I do think the nature of work is changing quite dramatically in front of our very eyes. Some jobs will clearly be automated out of existence. We are already seeing that. And other jobs will go from being full time employment to on demand employment and that will require big adjustments from everyone, including policymakers.

I thought it was interesting in Henry Blodget’s talk at DLD, which I blogged this past weekend, that we have gained 30 hours a month in productivity over the past fifty years and that 28 hours of those gains have gone towards watching TV. We are going to gain even more hours in productivity over the next fifty years. And what we do with those hours will say a lot about who we are as people, what we value, and where we are headed as a society. It is very possible that jobs and work will matter less and other things will matter more, a concept my partner Albert has been considering in his book World After Capital.

Fred Wilson

This is what I’m actually the most worried about in relation to the increasing automation of jobs: not that society will not find a way to redistribute wealth to the unemployed masses, but how will these masses fill their newly found free time. I don’t think it likely that the majority will reorient towards ‘creative’ occupations; first of all because I don’t think most people have particular talents in that area, and secondly because to be an artist you also need an audience – if everyone becomes an artist, who will ‘appreciate’ their art? It’s far more likely these people will become massive entertainment consumers: on TV, but even more on the Internet, on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and any new social media platform that will emerge in the mean time. This past year we have seen how indiscriminate consumption of social media can wreak havoc on democratic societies; are we prepared for a storm tens, maybe hundreds of times bigger?