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Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

latimes.com

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Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

#91

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

fulafel wrote: post #59
colechristensen wrote: post #24

These are property tax abatements. I don't see the big deal. Apple has to pay the property tax equal to the farmland for the next 20 years instead of the much higher tax on the datacenter property. Who cares? Unless someone is arguing the datacenter is going to use a lot of tax funded city services (police? fire? ... ?), Waukee isn't giving Apple anything. On top of that Apple is pledging to give them $100M for vario…

Companies are supposed to pay taxes so we can have schools, healthcare, basic income etc. When they bid countries or states against each other to get tax breaks and governments play the game, citizens lose. Yes, it happens in other cases too, and citizens should also protest against those other cases.

A corporation is purely a legal notion. In real life, when you shake down a corporation so that "we" can have nice stuff, you are shaking down that corporation's shareholders, employees, and customers. These folks already paid their fair share of income and sales taxes. And they can also be referred to using a first-person pronoun.

Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

#93

Post by AnthonyMouse »

fulafel wrote: post #59
colechristensen wrote: post #24

These are property tax abatements. I don't see the big deal. Apple has to pay the property tax equal to the farmland for the next 20 years instead of the much higher tax on the datacenter property. Who cares? Unless someone is arguing the datacenter is going to use a lot of tax funded city services (police? fire? ... ?), Waukee isn't giving Apple anything. On top of that Apple is pledging to give them $100M for vario…

Companies are supposed to pay taxes so we can have schools, healthcare, basic income etc. When they bid countries or states against each other to get tax breaks and governments play the game, citizens lose. Yes, it happens in other cases too, and citizens should also protest against those other cases.

There is nothing wrong with states competing with each other.

If one state has poor schools then companies won't want to be there because they won't be able to find competent employees. If one state has no government healthcare subsidies then employees there will demand higher wages so they can pay for healthcare.

The states that have better schools and more subsidies will have correspondingly higher taxes. The only way that creates a disadvantage is if the tax money is being spent inefficiently, so that the benefits don't outweigh the costs. Or, on the other side, the state is giving more to a company in benefits than the company pays in taxes and the company becomes a parasite.

But that is not a race to the bottom because ineffective programs and corporate parasites are bad. Pressure to eliminate them is good and the state that best eliminates them wins, as it should be.

Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

#95

Post by _delirium »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #91
fulafel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are supposed to pay taxes so we can have schools, healthcare, basic income etc. When they bid countries or states against each other to get tax breaks and governments play the game, citizens lose. Yes, it happens in other cases too, and citizens should also protest against those other cases.

A corporation is purely a legal notion. In real life, when you shake down a corporation so that "we" can have nice stuff, you are shaking down that corporation's shareholders, employees, and customers. These folks already paid their fair share of income and sales taxes. And they can also be referred to using a first-person pronoun.

In this case, it wouldn't really be in Apple's interest to say we should treat them as just individual people who happen to work together. They're only getting a custom property-tax abatement deal because they're a large and important corporation that's treated differently than regular people are. If a bunch of separate individuals had bought parts of this land and each ran small-scale businesses on it, they'd be paying regular property-tax rates, and no state legislator would be rushing to grant them a special carve-out.

Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

#96

Post by BLanen »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #93
fulafel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are supposed to pay taxes so we can have schools, healthcare, basic income etc. When they bid countries or states against each other to get tax breaks and governments play the game, citizens lose. Yes, it happens in other cases too, and citizens should also protest against those other cases.

There is nothing wrong with states competing with each other. If one state has poor schools then companies won't want to be there because they won't be able to find competent employees. If one state has no government healthcare subsidies then employees there will demand higher wages so they can pay for healthcare. The states that have better schools and more subsidies will have correspondingly higher taxes. The only…

Willfully naive.

You presume that all companies choose the locations that will benefit them in the long-term.

Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

#98

Post by diddid »

kkielhofner wrote: post #48
diddid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is giving anyone money, they are just not charging them tax. It's an important distinction I don't understand how people keep glossing over it. If it creates 10,000 local jobs, those 10,000 jobs are still going to get taxed. So the locale is going to get money, just not from the corporate tax. So it's not a great deal but it's not a horrible deal. I'd prefer nobody made them but once on place does they all hav…

Some estimates show that to cover the generous incentives Wisconsin will most likely need to pay Foxconn cash from the treasury for the foreseeable future: http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2017/07/28/foxco... The "local jobs" argument is eroded further for Wisconsin when you consider that the proposed sites are all well within commute range for a large population of Illinois residents - something that didn…

Nowhere in that article does it state how they’ll just get checks. Maybe I’m not understanding tax credits because that article says the same thing, they will get up to 200 million a year in tax credits. If you have no tax, you get no credit. Better than a deduction, but not writing a check. Anything past that is all “some estimates” which really are just people making things up.

Also, people commute, you can’t stop them all. That’s the nature for all business and it’s part of the game you play with these deals.

Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

#99

Post by rxhernandez »

colechristensen wrote: post #87
didgeoridoo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up a sham subsidiary in Delaware and doing a tricky tax inversion is completely different from "incorporating in Delaware to avoid taxes." YC rightly recommends incorporating in Delaware because the state has a predictable structure of corporate law and courts that are expert in applying it. Implying that incorporation in Delaware is inherently some kind of tax dodge is bordering on slanderous.

Implying that not taking advantage of every legal avenue to minimizing tax burden while incorporated in Delaware is exercising your fiduciary duty to your investors is willful ignorance.

Maybe there are other duties to other groups that are more important than your investors. I can't believe I even have to say that out loud. I can extend your fiduciary duty to uber easily insofar as them doing malicious things so long as the payoff was better than the legal costs. Hell I can extend this to certain evil pharmaceutical entities with little more additional effort.

Your logic is either naive or you don't care about your fellow man. If it is the latter, I wish you your just deserts

Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals

#100

Post by wavefunction »

gtCameron wrote: post #25
MattSteelblade wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits home as a Wisconsin resident. Best case scenario, we're looking at 2042 to turn a profit[1]. [1] http://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/misc/lfb/bill_summaries/2017...

What year would Wisconsin turn a profit off of Foxconn if it didn’t build a factory there at all?

Presumably this year, if they paid each person as outlined above because they'd be getting income tax back from the individuals.

They could even pay those people $30,000 a year for ten years to work on civic projects and achieve even more 'profit' or return on investment.

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