Essay About Group Vice President Tom Grenfield And Paul Thomas

Carborundum CaseIn May 2001, with the next meeting of the Carborundum Policy and Planning Council only two weeks away, group vice president Tom Grenfield was preparing his position on the expansion of Ceramax production facilities. His assistant, Paul Thomas, working with an outside consultant, had conducted analyses of three alternative strategies and had come out in favor of a small expansion of Carborundum’s plant in Lockport, New York. His recommendation was based primarily on economic considerations, however, and Grenfield was weighing some of the more qualitative considerations to see if they might possibly overrule the economics. The economics, he suspected, might be open to question, since they were based on forecasts and assumptions that were, in some cases, little more than intuitive guesswork. He wondered how far some of these assumptions would have to be altered before the economic position shifted to favor another alternative.

The discussion of the expansion and changes in economic conditions, and the political environment that it might take, continued. It also intensified to the point where I learned in 2002 a more fundamental change was at stake in the policy approach to Carborundum and that was the need for a political process to achieve both, once and for all, to support and reduce Carborundum development. To have any plausible view about where the two sides would meet on the issue of Carborundum was to take into account, I concluded, the extent to which the Carborundum Plan would actually be different from today’s, and I was confident that a political process to deal with the development of Carborundum would take place, once and for all, after that.

In recent years, though, the decision to make major changes of any sort has been quite difficult to accept. On the one hand, and especially in 2010, it has been a long and complicated process. The debate over how to govern Carborundum, such as the recent government shutdown and the looming impending “debt shutdown,” has made this difficult work far more difficult. More important, it has had a profound effect on policy direction, which is far more consequential, in the political sphere than anything else. (And it has made it much harder to achieve the objectives of the Carborundum Policy, which are clearly the most likely directions to take.) These efforts have taken many, many years to accomplish, and there is very little precedent for such a change in policy policy before these challenges arose.

Lorenstein: Now that we know what to do, I want to ask, one more question with respect to the issue regarding the tax reform question. Do you recognize the “carried interest” clause in the Tax Policy Center “bill of rights” that has been a sticking point for the House Democrats (CPD members)? Do you consider that it’s too soon to talk about it ?

Steven: Sure. But I still think the main question that’s been asked is, did they want, for instance, to raise the corporate tax rate to 26 percent from 35 percent, and also raise it a little bit, or would that have been a good plan, because I think it would be just as fair, if not more fair, as they would have liked to do.  It’s too early to say for sure, but we have some pretty strong concerns about that and the other side’s going to have its way in the next year, and we just want to be very cautious about it.

Lorenstein: Well, I think the question that I wanted to have for the audience last point is about how much more you are willing to allow certain political elements to play.  The House Budget Committee, for example, had voted, in a vote last summer for a major hike in the corporate tax rate to 26 percent from 35 percent, and so in addition to raising the corporate tax rate, it should raise the corporate income tax rate (though it should be lowered to 18 percent) on income over $250 million.  When you think about some of your constituents who are actually earning more over the long haul.  Here’s a question I want to ask you in this regard, and I think you’ll find it very helpful. The first question is, are you willing or not willing to allow some political element to play, and if not, why?  The other question — I asked a question in a previous video to you, with Mark, how many of you were willing or not willing to allow political elements on either side to play a piece of this issue?  I think we’re on track to about a million or two, but I’m sure that’s a lot, but maybe not a lot if you add a lot of folks who just don’t agree with me.  So we need to have a plan on both sides.

Lorenstein: Just to clear some things up, what are the things that we’re waiting on in October that you think are more fundamental politically to your policy agenda? Because you had great success in the House last year.  And the biggest problem in that year, that you faced in 2010, was, and still is, with a very small number of people out here on Capitol Hill, is that their numbers can’t be relied on, whether they’re on the Democratic side, whether or not you support their agenda, and so what you need to do is to have a political plan that doesn’t allow too much money being spent on the legislative side, for political purposes, and that actually serves the American people best.  They’re going to be very, very disappointed, because I’m

Second, even in the absence of a legislative resolution to this effect, I was aware that any major political change in Carborundum would take into account a growing set of social, economic, and ecological issues in the near future. But, as I have suggested repeatedly, there is a way of interpreting this shift, from a public relations approach to a political one.

For the last 100 years or so, there have been some fundamental shifts in the history of capital. But this one has not yet moved into a final status that the public would necessarily be willing to recognize. I do not claim knowledge of the history or the current state of the debate or of the relationship between the US and Carborundum, but I do know that public opinion and the political environment had shifted dramatically and now there are still some major trends that are at work and some minor changes that remain to be determined.

Fourth, there are significant changes underway in the planning of the project. The state of New York State was in the process of developing the Capital Development Corporation, which, in 2002, came under a new state law requiring the city council to approve plans to build a 10,000- square foot building, along which would be the facility for the construction of the new Metrorail and the station system. For many years, it had been known that the State did not have sufficient funds for the expansion of the capital and needed an existing plan for funding the project. But a 2010 federal judge ruled, in a landmark ruling, that the capital plan had some validity and that there was some basis for concluding it was “sufficiently ambitious” for the state to finance the project. A second federal judge ordered in April that the state had amended its permitting to allow for the construction of the $1.1 billion project so that the city did not have to pay federal taxes in the first place. The state also moved to require that the original plan be updated as it was in time for the second phase of construction.

Fifth, there have been several major changes that have occurred in the transportation system in recent years:

Grenfield was also mulling over another aspect of the problem. Thomas had worked hard on this project and appeared to be emotionally committed both to the discounted cash flow approach he had taken and to the recommendation at which he had arrived. To give Thomas experience with some of the most senior executives in the company, Grenfield had asked him to deliver his report to the council. Grenfield knew that the executives like him might be more familiar with and heavily influenced by some of the qualitative aspects of the situation, and he wondered whether this was really the appropriate forum for Thomas’ presentation. Moreover, he suspected that