Friedman: Only Huge Corporate Tax Cuts Can Save Us
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One of life’s more vexing minor challenges is picking which sentences in a given Thomas Friedman column to mock. I’ll start here:
Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones, which brings me to the subject of this column.
Stuff like this elevates preemptive self-parody to high art. The facile Jetsons / Flintstones analogy comes quickly on the heels of more vintage Friedman-speak (”We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification”) before being immediately (and thankfully) abandoned. Note to columnists: if you have to announce the subject of your column as the subject of your column, you haven’t written a very good column.
The rest of the column consists of simply reprinting the thoughts of Intel C.E.O. Paul Otellini on “competitiveness.” Friedman describes acting as Otellini’s scribe as “my public service for the week,” because apparently the C.E.O. of a company that turned a $5 billion profit last year lacks in resources and opportunities to make his views on corporate tax policy known.