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Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

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Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#71

Post by dontreact »

onion2k wrote: post #49
wjnc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear Jacques (i'll stop with the game now ;) - I really emphatise with the social responsibility part of the story. The game Apple is playing with stored cash abroad is abject. Nobody is profiting from that. But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary? If people offer you crazy deals: agree. Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for…

Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for-tat those that do. A preferable alternative would be for customers to consider a company's ethics in their purchasing decisions, and to encourage their peers to do the same. If it became socially unacceptable to have a new iPhone because of Apple's choice to pay such a trivial amount of tax (legal or otherwise, that's besides the point) y…

The problem is that there are now so few corporations, that you would actually have to opt out of having a smart phone entirely, since I believe Google probably does similar things (not sure of what the latest is).

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#72

Post by vacri »

wjnc wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear Tim, You don't understand how shares work. Shareholders can only benefit from shares in two ways: through speculation about the share price or through dividends. I'm kind of disappointed that I'd have to explain to a man of your stature that money that Apple parks abroad will not benefit the shareholders except in the most indirect ways. If Apple brought home their overseas funds then it would benefit the US and…

Dear Jacques (i'll stop with the game now ;) - I really emphatise with the social responsibility part of the story. The game Apple is playing with stored cash abroad is abject. Nobody is profiting from that. But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary? If people offer you crazy deals: agree. Governments should coordinate not to make crazy offers and perhaps even tit-for…

> But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary?

Think Different.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#73

Post by mattmanser »

nip wrote: post #18
mindw0rk wrote: post #4

The point about Apple hiring best graduates who got their education mostly free of charge cause of all the tax payers really shift my mind about the whole tax-avoidance thing.

It goes both ways, the hired graduates also benefit from this relationship: a salary used to live and buy goods, and incidentally pay taxes.

To be clear, the taxes paid by employees are their taxes, that they'd be paying if they worked for another company or set up their own business.

Obviously there is some effect from Apple being an employer in increasing the overall employment rate, but there's a reason Apple needs local employees to hawk it's products. If they weren't employing and selling locally, some other company would be employing those people and taking Apple's market share.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#74

Post by eref »

nip wrote: post #18
mindw0rk wrote: post #4

The point about Apple hiring best graduates who got their education mostly free of charge cause of all the tax payers really shift my mind about the whole tax-avoidance thing.

It goes both ways, the hired graduates also benefit from this relationship: a salary used to live and buy goods, and incidentally pay taxes.

Are there any statistics about how much of the value produced by professionals abroad actually flows back to the country of origin? Intuitively, I would say it is very little because why would you return once you live in much more privileged circumstances.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#75

Post by csomar »

jacquesm wrote: post #53
csomar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having money parked abroad waiting for a tax amnesty that may never happen Except that, Trump, (who paradoxically hate tech companies) is pushing for this tax amnesty. In that case parking money aboard paid big time for shareholders.

You can safely assume that Trump pushing for a tax amnesty does not have small-time shareholders of public companies in mind. I'd look a little closer at his inner circle where the major beneficiaries of such a move reside.

I'm not discussing who is benefiting from this but the odds of it happening. Also if this benefits Apple shareholders, I doubt this is Trump-clan only.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#76

Post by exDM69 »

JorgeGT wrote: post #29
blowski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People said the same about slavery. Change _is_ possible, but it requires a lot of patience.

Problem is, it was not a lot of patience what ended slavery in the US, it was a lot of violence.

And I'm afraid that it'll be a lot of violence ending tax evasion/optimization/avoidance too. The globalization game has winners and losers and it's starting to look like the losers outnumber the winners.

I'd like to see something done to the global economy system with peaceful means before someone resorts to violence.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#77

Post by fastball »

dontreact wrote: post #44
fastball wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think tax avoidance is morally justified. EDIT: Better phrasing - I think tax avoidance is not a moral problem. Laws are a moral problem, and tax avoidance is not against the law. /EDIT The entity making the tax code (the government) and the entity that collects taxes (the government) are one in the same. If the government wants me, as an individual or business, to pay taxes at a certain rate X, they should write t…

If there was only a single government in the world that would be true but really there are many governments making and collecting taxes, and their tax codes interact in unexpected ways. At this point I truly believe that it's not possible for a single government to unilaterally avoid such "optimizations" without some help from large multinational corporations leading the charge to coordinate tax codes across countrie…

You're not thinking simply enough. Watch - I'm going to write a tax code:

  If you are a business and sell a product or service in my country, you need to pay X% in taxes on that sale.

  If you live in my country, you need to pay Y% in income tax.
You get the idea. The issue isn't that making a loophole free tax code is super difficult. The issue is that every country thinks they can capture more mindshare/businesses/what have you if they have loopholes. The hard part isn't writing a tax code. The hard part is convincing all necessary parties in a democracy that it's good for them.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#78

Post by jarym »

lucozade wrote: post #50
jarym wrote: post #5

"Such “tax optimization” – albeit legal – is only possible because specialized law firms such as Appleby devise complex company structures inaccessible to most other firms" Maybe governments should simplify their own tax rules. Then you wouldn't need specialised law firms and simpler tax systems are harder to bypass. To add, there is nothing 'moral' about tax - you have no choice but to pay what you're legally obliga…

> Maybe governments should simplify their own tax rules I can't see that happening. Tax policy is used by most governments as a fine grained tool for all forms of signalling. Not just economic either: alcohol, tobacco, fuel, renewables etc. all use the tax systems to promote social change. It's also quite handy for deflection i.e. if your economy's not doing as well as you'd want in an election cycle, blame the elite…

Tax policy needs to be recognised as a social issue.

If politicians are using the complexity as a tool then it stands to reason that the only ones that can efficiently navigate the resulting convoluting mess is the wealthy.

It puts the less wealthy at a disadvantage and if the masses start calling for change then the only reasonable solution is to simplify legislation.

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#79

Post by thanatropism »

thomasahle wrote: post #13
jarym wrote: post #5

"Such “tax optimization” – albeit legal – is only possible because specialized law firms such as Appleby devise complex company structures inaccessible to most other firms" Maybe governments should simplify their own tax rules. Then you wouldn't need specialised law firms and simpler tax systems are harder to bypass. To add, there is nothing 'moral' about tax - you have no choice but to pay what you're legally obliga…

I wonder if you could prove something like Arrows theorem for taxes. Who knows if it's even possible to design a tax system, with the properties we want, without enabling cheating? Or maybe it's only possible if all countries in the world agree on a tax code. But what are the chances of that?

The situation is much closer to the Prisoner's Dilemma. You're asking sovereign states to collude on a bidding war. How to establish optimal collusion?

Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook

#80

Post by styx31 »

What annoys me the most is that, as a small company, I can't evade from my country tax system. I pay the taxes. All of them, at full rate.

But there are these big companies which can afford to create offshore companies/holding just to evade some tax system, and lower their tax rate.

So, what? The tax rate of a country is now "artificial", because it will never be applied to all revenues from all companies, because the higher profiles will be able to evade a part of it.

If governments want to reclaim more, they could raise up the tax rate, considering that the biggest players will only pay a fragment of it. But the small companies, the one that can only follow the rules? They are screwed.

All companies should be considered equals regarding the tax system. It is simply not the case when such schemes are used.

Edit: exactly the same point of view as jitbit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651457

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