Reuters Sustainable Finance Newsletter - A back-of-envelope look at taxes and freedom

By Ross Kerber

Jan 14 (Reuters) - This is the weekly Reuters Sustainable Finance Newsletter, which you can sign up for here .

Drug policy expert and my onetime professor Mark Kleiman, who died in 2019, named his consulting company BOTEC Analysis. That stood for "Back of the Envelope Calculation." My own back-of-the-envelope policy analysis of global tax burdens and democracy is surely not up to Kleiman's actually strict standards, but you can read about it in my column this week, linked below.

Then also, if it feels like everything is going to heck in a handbasket, I've got further confirmation for you with links below to stories I would not have imagined occurring several years ago. These include our coverage about the U.S. President flipping off a factory worker, and criticism of Apple and Alphabet over the Grok chatbot after it began flooding the X.com social media site with sexualized photos of women and children. Happy 2026!

Please follow me on LinkedIn and/or Bluesky. You can reach me via ross.kerber@thomsonreuters.com

A followup on taxes and freedom

Last month I spoke with Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution, who made case for high taxes that make governments responsible to the needs of citizens. She says authoritarians prefer low taxes and less important governments.

I tested if this framing holds true in the real world by comparing global freedoms and tax burdens by country. It does look like low taxes don't always mean more freedom.

Then I shared what I found with some analysts. Their feedback included that while the U.S. tax burden may seem relatively low, Americans pay privately for some things like insurance that are provided through the public sector in Europe. Cultural and social homogeneity may also play a role in public attitudes towards taxation.

You can click here to read more. Please get in touch if you know of other research covering this ground that I missed b/c my AI and Google searches were too BOTEC.

Company news

An unraveled corporate pact to protect the Amazon rainforest has left environmentalists skeptical that grain traders will keep pledges to avoid crops grown on recent deforested lands in Brazil, our ANALYSIS shows.

Women's groups, tech watchdogs and progressive activists want Alphabet GOOGL.O and Apple AAPL.O to pull social media site X.com and the Grok chatbot from their app stores after Elon Musk's services began generating sexually charged, degrading or violent images of women and children.

U.S. President Donald Trump flipped off and appeared to swear at a worker during a tour of a Ford F.N truck plant after he appeared to criticize Trump's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter. The worker's union said he was suspended, and just out of curiosity I would really like to sit in on his disciplinary hearing.

On my radar

Superorganism, which calls itself the first VC firm focused on tech-driven biodiversity solutions, said it closed its first fund with $25.9 million in commitments.

Brian Daly, director of the Division of Investment Management at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, asked for input as the agency reviews the proxy voting process. He also said AI tools could help review and vote corporate ballot items.

Share your ideas for on-stage interviews by journalists at Reuters Responsible Business USA, May 5–6 in Boston, coinciding with Boston Climate Week. The conference will explore corporate sustainability challenges including regulations, supply chain management, energy optimization, decarbonization and climate risk. My colleagues are lining up interviews with news‑making corporate executives and major policy voices, and we’d love your suggestions. Please let us know via this form who you'd be most excited to see us interview live.