• First an announcement: owning to travel schedules, Lucretia and I were not able to schedule our weekly Power Line University seminar on The Federalist, and we’re almost at the end! Next week we promise, probably Wednesday. But stay tuned to this space.
• The left: Corporations don’t pay enough taxes because of tax loopholes and special-interest tax breaks.
Also the left: We need more tax breaks and subsidies for all the green stuff we want!
Corporate Tax Breaks Surge in Push for Chip and Electric-Vehicle Factories
States and cities, flush with pandemic-stimulus cash, are ramping up their pursuit of new jobs by showering companies with big tax breaks.
States and local governments, including in Georgia, Michigan and West Virginia, agreed to give out at least $1 billion in subsidies eight times in 2022, according to an analysis from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that is often critical of subsidies. These tax breaks, cash grants and other incentives went to companies in return for opening a factory.
Those are the most subsidies of that size ever in a single year.
• The left: Oil is horrible, and must be suppressed by any means necessary, because climate change!
Also the left: We love socialist Venezuela!
Venezuela’s Oil Industry, Reopening to Investors, Is Major Polluter
. . . PdVSA hasn’t reported data on oil spills and workplace accidents since 2016. That year, it recorded more than 8,000 spills, four times as many as in 1999, when Venezuela’s ruling leftist government first took office and Venezuela produced far more oil.
“We are completely in the dark when it comes to hard scientific information about the environment in Venezuela,” said Bram Ebus, an environmental researcher who tracks Venezuela at the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to preventing conflict. . .
Venezuela’s government had for decades made fuel virtually free for its nearly 30 million residents, which environmentalists and economists have said encouraged waste and helped to put the country in the ranks of the region’s biggest CO2 emitters, per capita, according to data platform Climate Watch.
• Keep your eye on Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who may turn out to have committed academic fraud on a significant scale earlier in his career. The Stanford Daily—the student newspaper—is driving the story:
Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege
In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. “Because of this research,” read Genentech’s annual letter to shareholders, “we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease.”
But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time; two were senior scientists and two were scientists who also served as executives. Three spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the allegations and non-disclosure agreements. The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.
This is not the first credible allegation of academic malfeasance by Tessier-Lavigne. Maybe we should start a pool on a like date for his resignation.
UPDATE [by Scott]: Courtesy of David Drucker, we note that President Tessier-Lavigne has issued a statement denying the allegations: “False allegations in the Stanford Daily.”
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