Tom Friedman's public service

The photo you see here is Thomas Friedman's home.

So it is no wonder that he sees it as his "public service" to transcribe the orations of the CEO of a major corporation on his "fix" for what ails America. Hint: corporate taxes.

“The things that are not conducive to investments here are [corporate] taxes and capital equipment credits,” he said. “A new semiconductor factory at world scale built from scratch is about $4.5 billion — in the United States. If I build that factory in almost any other country in the world, where they have significant incentive programs, I could save $1 billion,” because of all the tax breaks these governments throw in. Not surprisingly, the last factory Intel built from scratch was in China. “That comes online in October,” he said. “And it wasn’t because the labor costs are lower. Yeah, the construction costs were a little bit lower, but the cost of operating when you look at it after tax was substantially lower and you have local market access.”

[...]

If the government just boosted the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lowered corporate taxes, argued Otellini, and we “started one or two more projects in companies around the country that made them more productive and more competitive, the government’s tax revenues are going to grow.” With the generous research and development tax credits and lower corporate taxes they receive, Intel’s chief competitors in South Korea basically have “zero cost of money,” said Otellini. Intel can compete against that with superior technology, but many other U.S. firms can’t.

Maybe Otellini's right. Or maybe, just maybe, he's using this as to camouflage that his is going off-shore for cheaper labor. As he admits, talent is everywhere these days. But shouldn't his claim be evaluated a bit rather than hand over the op-ed page of the most influential newspaper in the country (and, sadly, one of its most influential columnists) to the CEO of Intel?

I mean, Thomas Friedman would make a great corporate flak if his prose weren't so leaden and his cliches not so painful.