(11-17-2019 08:51 AM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  Meanwhile, you have story after story like this.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/...nt=event25
(FedEx goes from a $1.5 billion tax bill to 0 after Trump tax cuts).
Disclaimer - the tax cuts are great for my wife's business. But our deficit continues to climb and climb and climb. I'm not really sure how that's any better than the doom and gloom all of you are worried about with Warren.

Let me try to explain a bit of tax accounting to you non-accountants. The primary factor reducing their total tax provision in 2018 was $1.354 billion (or 90% of the reduction) in remeasurement of deferred taxes. This has absolutely nothing to do with their 2018 tax bill or actual taxes paid.

What happens is that tax laws allow certain deductions to be taken quicker for taxes than for GAAP accounting. Say they were able to take $200 million in depreciation under accelerated provisions for tax purposes but only $100 million for more conservative GAAP accounting purposes. For GAAP accounting, you provide deferred taxes at the statutory rate for such timing differences. At the old 35% rate, you would have provided $35 million in deferred taxes, to reflect tat at some point such timing differences turn around. Under the 2017 law, that rate dropped to 22%, so you had a $13 million reduction in deferred taxes. Fedex has a lot of airplanes, so it has a lot of deferred taxes. The recalculation of deferred taxes accounted for the difference in tax provision, but had zero to do with Fedex's actual tax bill or payments. You can see this very clearly at:

https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?actio...rl_type=v#

Go to the menu in the left hand column, select "Notes to Financial Statements," and from the drop-down menu select "Income taxes."

By the way, the SEC EDGAR page is a good place to go to get information about the financial condition of any public company.