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How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

bbc.co.uk

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Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#131

Post by RingwormOne »

mrguyorama wrote: post #70
RingwormOne wrote: post #24

Don't fault corporations for exploiting legal loopholes to save money... They optimize what they must optimize as operating businesses, and if we the citizens want to compel them to do something we must pass the laws necessary to do so... Stop moralizing the behavior of companies. They aren't humans. If you choose not to buy apple products in reaction to their behavior, great. If you want to convince your friends to…

Every human being in that company should be held accountable for their actions. Someone, somewhere said "Yes let's do it this way", and they committed an (arguably) immoral act by doing so.

Be careful, you're rejecting the rule of law if you advocate for legal repercussions. What you judge to be immoral may not be judged to be immoral by others. When outrage of the masses is the sufficient condition for legal punishment, we have mob rule.

Apple should be held accountable by whom? The government? The consumer? Apple did not break a law, so law enforcement cannot hold them accountable. The consumer can decide not to buy Apple products though, that is a reasonable response.

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#132

Post by abritinthebay »

nautilus12 wrote: post #38
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should simply make large corporations like Apple actually follow the existing tax laws Apple is in compliance with our tax laws. The laws, not Apple, are the underlying problem.

No, the spirit of the law is effectively being broken. Sidestepping the law does not constitute following it in my opinion. Laws are meant to be guidelines and legal precedent defines its true extent, you cannot make laws extensive enough to cover every scenario. If they make it illegal to offshore money then apple will simply find a way to establish a corporation on the moon. Its clearly demonstrable that they are g…

> If they make it illegal to offshore money...

... then the US would immediately end up losing all it's multinational companies to less insane countries.

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#134

Post by anigbrowl »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19
nautilus12 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying that rather than taxing the middle class more that we should simply make large corporations like Apple actually follow the existing tax laws? Owing to its source it doesn't sound like this idea is going to be popular on hacker news, in spite of its blatant rationality.

> we should simply make large corporations like Apple actually follow the existing tax laws Apple is in compliance with our tax laws. The laws, not Apple, are the underlying problem.

Apple spent ~$3.5 million on lobbying in the first 6 months of the Trump administration: https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/21/apple-trump-lobbying-increase...

How many times do we have to reiterate the point that large corporations and the people who own them spend a fortune on lobbying sitting politicians and bankrolling their election campaigns, and that the controls on such spending limits have been systematically dismantled over the years, in decisions like Citizens United, among others?

Trotting out these facile arguments like 'it's not corporations, it's the laws!' without acknowledging this point borders on trolling. Could you please do your fellow HNers the courtesy of acknowledging what they're actually saying instead of just repeating simplistic shallow comebacks?

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#135

Post by abritinthebay »

PeterStuer wrote: post #36
whatok wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Apple is following existing tax laws.

Pretty sure Apple and their 'class' is writing the existing tax laws.

Apple has actually argued for better tax laws (that they'd pay more under!) but the problem here is that the US is absolutely a complete anomaly in how it handles this issue.

It's literally cheaper for Apple to store the cash outside the US and then get loans for the money they can't bring into the country.

That's just wacky. For a country that is incredibly pro-business and pro-corporate the USA is very strange on this front.

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#136

Post by anigbrowl »

abritinthebay wrote: post #132
nautilus12 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the spirit of the law is effectively being broken. Sidestepping the law does not constitute following it in my opinion. Laws are meant to be guidelines and legal precedent defines its true extent, you cannot make laws extensive enough to cover every scenario. If they make it illegal to offshore money then apple will simply find a way to establish a corporation on the moon. Its clearly demonstrable that they are g…

> If they make it illegal to offshore money... ... then the US would immediately end up losing all it's multinational companies to less insane countries.

Prove it. I think companies like being in the US because of the sophisticated capital markets, strong and predictable legal environment, and deep pockets of American consumers. I'd like some evidence instead of hyperbole.

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#137

Post by cmurf »

canuckintime wrote: post #4
rrggrr wrote: post #2

If passed, and for a brief period of time, Trump's dollar repatriation tax scheme brings home some of the +2 trillion dollars sequestered abroad - including some of the billions Apple has parked offshore. http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-gop-tax-reform-plan-bil... There's something to be said for Apple's efforts to level the playing field against the favorable tax & public policies under which Samsung and Huawei…

Or the US Congress could just change the law, close the loophole and require corporations to bring the money home anyway without any tax holidays...

They could also get their thumbs out of their asses, but they won't.

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#138

Post by kobeya »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #89
canuckintime wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the US Congress could just change the law, close the loophole and require corporations to bring the money home anyway without any tax holidays...

No, they couldn't. The money belongs to foreign corporations also named Apple whatever. That little issue is purposefully glossed over for the sake of sensationalism to sell advertising, of course.

Treat income of any foreign company wholly owned or with substantially similar ownership structure of a domestic company as taxable income for that domestic company.

I don't think this is a good idea; I'm just demonstrating that it's not impossible.

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#139

Post by anigbrowl »

RingwormOne wrote: post #24

Don't fault corporations for exploiting legal loopholes to save money... They optimize what they must optimize as operating businesses, and if we the citizens want to compel them to do something we must pass the laws necessary to do so... Stop moralizing the behavior of companies. They aren't humans. If you choose not to buy apple products in reaction to their behavior, great. If you want to convince your friends to…

Stop moralizing the behavior of companies. They aren't humans.

OK, then they don't get to participate in politics by lobbying or making political donations of any kind, or buying political advertising.

Re: How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices

#140

Post by visarga »

pm90 wrote: post #117
microcolonel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pure free market Capitalism is playing a game of Monopoly where after each time anyone passes go, the player with the most money gets to create a new rule. Guess what? The game is gonna get pretty skewed, pretty darn fast. I think you've misunderstood the free in free market . If anyone is allowed to make rules like that, it is not a free market , not superlatively, not normally, not even slightly. The problem here…

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, you actually make a great point. If there exists a Govt. which has the power to impose certain rules which change the markets, its by definition not "free". If there was no Govt. to create and enforce these rules, corporations could not influence said Govt. to create unfair rules (since it does not exist). But I don't agree with your conclusion. If there were truly no Govt. cr…

> Reduce that influence and you will have a Govt. that works for the general interests of its people.

I recently found out about an old solution that would achieve that goal: Sortition. Instead of having elections every few years, we could randomly pick a hundred people from the population and task them with creating a law. After an initial preparation, they would deliberate like a jury and their decisions would be written as law. After a single task, they should disband and new groups should be selected for new tasks. With a country of hundreds of millions of people, it would be a light burden on the population to serve from time to time.

The benefits are: 1. by random selection, every social category is represented equally, 2. there is no need to have elections, so no lobbying and money in politics, and 3. because the legislative group only works on a single task, once, they can't grasp power, like politicians do.

I believe a group of 100 random people would make more heartfelt and wise decisions than a parliament full of professional liars. Regular population is more in touch with reality. Regular population needs to be heard directly because politics sucks, and this is a way to do it.

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