The New York Times accused FedEx on Sunday of essentially having lobbied President Donald Trump to sign tax cuts into law with the promise of businesses using the saved money to reinvest in and further grow their companies, and then failing to invest the billions of dollars that it reportedly saved as a result of the tax cuts.
“In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut – for which the company had lobbied hard,” The New York Times reported on Sunday. “
Late on Sunday, FedEx CEO Frederick Smith responded to The New York Times’ story by calling it factually incorrect, claiming that The New York Times is the company that does not pay federal income taxes, and challenging the publisher of The New York Times to a debate on tax policy.
“The New York Times published a distorted and factually incorrect story on the front page of the Sunday, November 17 edition concerning FedEx and our billions of dollars of tax payments and billions of dollars of investments in the U.S. economy,” Smith wrote.
“Pertinent to this outrageous distortion of the truth is the fact that unlike FedEx, the New York Times paid zero federal income tax in 2017 on earnings of $111 million, and only $30 million in 2018 – 18% of their pretax book income. Also in 2018 the New York Times cut their capital investments nearly in half to $57 million, which equates to a rounding error when compared to the $6 billion of capital that FedEx invested in the U.S. economy during that same year.”