No, Batwoman’s Engagement Doesn’t Solve DC Comics’ Orson Scott Card Problem

Over at io9, Rob Bricken asks whether Batwoman’s in-costume proposal to her girlfriend Maggie Sawyer will earn DC Comics good-will that it lost by hiring National Organization for Marriage board member and virulent homophobe Orson Scott Card, or “is this too little, too late for the company”?

I’m 99% sure the only reason DC hasn’t mentioned Batwoman’s marriage to the press is because it would call attention to the furor caused by the company’s recent decision to hire Orson Scott Card, scifi author and ardent detractor of gay rights, to write Adventures of Superman. Angry fans and retailers alike are planning to boycott the Superman comic in general, and some DC in particular unless Card is removed.

It’s too early to tell if Batwoman’s proposal will at all mitigate DC’s public relations problems with Card, or even if Card might have a problem collecting a check from a company whose works seemingly condone gay marraige. But at the moment, at least Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer are happy, even if nobody else is.

I’m always delighted to see more, and richer depictions of gay characters, especially in a medium where they were marginalized by the Comics Code and the disapprobation of Congress, a panic fed by cooked research. But this plot development won’t save DC Comics, and not just because a proposal on the page doesn’t really outweigh the harm Card’s speech and actions cause in the real world. Who gets hired to create content and what content ends up on the page are issues that are often related, but that function separately. People who care about where their money goes and the values of the content that they consume are going to care about both of those elements.

Something I wish I’d said more clearly the first itme I wrote about DC’s decision to hire Card to write Superman is that calls to fire him don’t appeal to me that strongly because it separates out his hiring from DC’s other hiring practices, which among other things, have produced a staff with very few women and no lead African-American writers on any comics titles. A decision by comics stores not to stock the title, demonstrating that Card’s values turn them off from a product that otherwise might have been profitable for them, makes more sense. And what would be most interesting to me is an explanation from DC about what process lead to Card’s selection. What made his pitches’ stronger than other writers? How did they weigh the likely publicity challenges from his employment against what appears to be a larger institutional imperative to modernize the brand by telling stories about committed gay couples? If DC Comics wants its image to be gay-friendly, then it should have been expected to be evaluated for consistency. More same-sex engagements doesn’t eliminate the appearance of a glaring contradiction in DC’s image.

If all DC wants is our money, rather than our social approval, that’s fine. But it needs to recognize that fishing for money on the grounds that it’s producing progressive and game-changing content is going to be a more difficult task if there’s a disconnect between what the content is, and who the money spent on it ends up going to.

View the original article here

Why Manny Pacquiao Refusing To Fight In Vegas Doesn’t Prove A Problem With American Tax Policy

Conservatives are overjoyed at the news that boxer Manny Pacquiao is refusing to fight his next bout in the United States because he doesn’t want to pay taxes, and anti-tax groups like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform are already using it as an example of how America’s “punitive” tax policy makes it less competitive with other countries around the world.

ATR first worries that the American tax code will make it more likely that other boxers follow Pacquiao’s lead, then expands into a broader critique of taxes on ordinary American investment:

Fewer boxing matches per year would mean fewer vendors, a decrease in tourism, and less money being spent in host cities. Hosting a major sporting event has proven to create jobs and insert economic life within the city. The federal government needs to follow the examples being set by GOP governors seeking to reduce their respective state’s income tax burden or risk losing investments across every industry.

At the end of the day, people migrate and invest in places where they will receive the most for their services and skills. The higher the income tax, the less return these same people will see. By continuing to have this excessively high income tax, the U.S. continues to discourage businesses and workers looking to make profitable investments.

The most obvious problem with this thinking is that the Marquez-Pacquiao fight is somehow going to bring great benefit to Las Vegas. It won’t. Fight or no fight, Vegas hotels and casinos are going to be full of high-rollers and ordinary gamblers and non-gamblers alike, because it’s Las Vegas. The utility of a sporting event in that type of economy is almost certainly even smaller than the utility of bigger sporting events, and gearing tax policy toward the attraction of sporting events is a terrible idea anyway.

The real problem, though, is the idea that tax policy is somehow the only factor in where future fights will take place. Fight promoters are going to lose a substantial amount of money if Pacquiao and Marquez fight in Asia, because more people will pay to watch if they fight in the U.S. That means there is an advantage for promoters and even most boxers to fighting in the U.S. even if they have to pay higher tax rates. It even extends in Pacquiao’s case, since lower tax rates aren’t the only reason he wants to fight in southeast Asia: nearing the end of his career, the Filipino boxer sees it as an opportunity to broaden his global fan base.

And that hits at the fallacy of ATR’s broader critique of American tax policy. Conservatives aren’t necessarily wrong when they argue that “people migrate and invest in places where they will receive the most for their services and skills.” Where they go wrong is in assuming that tax rates are the only or even the dominant determinant in that equation, and in assuming that people and their investments automatically flow to the lowest tax rate attainable. Place matters to people, and the United States is still a more advantageous place to do business, make social and business connections, and live than many other countries with lower tax rates. That’s why rich people don’t flee high-tax states like California and New York en masse, because California and New York still offer business and social advantages to many of the people who choose to live there that other states don’t have. And it’s why businesspeople and their investment don’t just up and leave the U.S. even though we charge a higher personal tax rate than many other countries. There’s no evidence backing up the claim that taxing the rich hurts growth or drives away investment, and in the U.S., periods of higher marginal tax rates actually featured higher rates of economic growth.

There are any number of reasons why people choose to live, invest, and do business in the places they do, and taxes fund many of the things, from education to infrastructure to law enforcement that protects against the graft and corruption that are the price of doing business in Macau, that make certain places advantageous to others. Conservatives don’t like to acknowledge that reality, though, because it makes it obvious that race-to-the-bottom tax policy, in which wealthy people like Pacqiuao benefit at the expense of everyone else, is a fallacious idea.

View the original article here