70% downvotes on /r/apple, posted 17h ago.
Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
301–310 of 817 posts
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I appreciate the sentiment it is time to start taking a more global look at these antics of companies. I run my own company in the UK and I know for a fact that apple makes a massive amount of money selling in this country. Now as a small business owner I am taxed at 20% on corporate profit. (19% going forward now due to a tax cut in corporate rates introduced during the last financial year). You then also get…
That's an interesting case to bring up. In the UK, it is very common (I'd go as far as to say it's the norm) for software contractors to start a single-person limited company and pay themselves through a mixture of salary and dividend in order to optimise their taxes. I wonder how many of these people consider that they are committing "tax avoidance" and "exploiting legal loopholes" too.
Maybe 15 years ago. IR35 has made that approach tax-neutral, at best.
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
These companies evading taxes are responsible for increased hardship and suffering of a society as well, leeching off of the nations they exist in, and being able to outcompete the honest organizations and people in them. The damages are far greater than the tax avoided. "They are doing it too" isn't a valid excuse either.
They aren't, for the most part, doing anything illegal though. They are using the existing laws to their best advantage. The fix for this can't be trying to appeal to their morals. It would have to be something else that just limits the legal choices. Edit: If you disagree, are you saying that shaming them into not doing this solely on some moral compass is the right fix? Does that scale?
Furthermore, the nature of competition means "moral" companies, moral defined loosely here as those who pay more taxes than legally required, are at a disadvantage to "immoral" companies who pay the legal minimum. It's a prisoner's dilemma for executives that really do want to do right by their communities.
The solution is to fix the tax code problem. If the moral "rules" don't apply to _everyone_ then they are worthless.
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't, for the most part, doing anything illegal though. They are using the existing laws to their best advantage. The fix for this can't be trying to appeal to their morals. It would have to be something else that just limits the legal choices. Edit: If you disagree, are you saying that shaming them into not doing this solely on some moral compass is the right fix? Does that scale?
Agreed, the only sane solution to this is a massive overhaul of international tax law. Shaming companies just isn't a scalable solution in any way. There's a massive opposition against this both from multinationals and tax haven countries though - this article is a good way to start making it obvious to normal citizens that this issue should be on the ballot.
The tax haven countries should be subjected to overwhelming, crushing sanctions. They deserve to be international pariahs.
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are actually things like the expatriation tax and "name and shame" provisions which discourage people from renouncing for tax purposes. Also (note that I am not an accountant or lawyer and this is not advice), most ordinary people won't see any problem with taxation while abroad beyond the actual inconvenience of filing a 1040 because the foreign earned income exclusion ( https://www.irs.gov/individuals/interna…
I guess it depends on your definition of "ordinary people", but if you're going abroad for long-term work in any "middle class" industry, you're eventually going to have extremely complicated taxes. Retirement savings, stock options, real estate, and any sort of investment account makes your U.S. tax return go from "a 1040" to a towering mountain of special forms. A lot of them also lose you the right to e-file, for…
WBK (https://www.bzwbk.pl/) seemed more than willing to open me a bank account quite recently. There were a few more forms due to my being a US citizen, but it seemed like actually fewer than my wife (a Polish citizen with a US Green Card) needed to do the same thing. Maybe things are stricter in the West than in Poland?
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#306What 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 th…
I'm really waiting for someone who makes the tax evasion system scale for small companies and regular people.
Tax evasion is and always will be, illegal. Tax avoidance is legal and undertaken by every single sane tax-payer who pays the minimum tax but computes that amount in accordance with the tax rules. The courts are available for redress if the tax authorities think the rules are being bent. Judgement is a legal matter and not one for debate by armchair moralists.
Those who don't like the way some tax laws operate in the realm of complex company operations should lobby the law-makers not those tax-payers working in compliance with the law.
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
There used to be a lot of natural factors which worked against monopolies. Every new market you introduced your product in brought along with it a layer of bureaucracy and middle management, which left you more bloated and unwieldy. This allowed smaller,local companies to have an agility and responsiveness advantage even if they offered the same service at a higher fee. Computers and the internet have made the proces…
You raise some good points. But I strongly believe in the innovative solutions brought forth by the free markets. It's not called "the invisible hand" for nothing. I am old enough to remember when whole IT industry used to be in the shadow of Microsoft (and IBM before that). Nobody could see a solution out of it! The government even tried to fix the problem and failed. Ten years later, Microsoft is becoming a nice pl…
I really can't understand if you're being ironic or not, but I hope you are because Microsoft has been under fire for a long time for their behaviour and even fined for it in the past.
No "invisible hand" there, more like someone yelling loudly at them.
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#308A lot of the responses here are missing the point. It's not that Apple must behave morally with regards to taxes, and not just legally.
It's that Apple claims to behave morally, and doesn't.
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
In these situations they always say, "everything we did was legal". But the problem is that powerful individuals and companies get to make the rules. They have lobbying power and a legal budget that allows them to influence the rules themselves. They get to decide what is legal, and use the legality as a shield.
The government makes the rules. The problem is that the government is made of politicians and they are by definition open to corruption (lobbying, contributions, etc). Those campaigns cost and administration salaries are not that big. The solution? Reduce the government's power and you take away the incentive of the whole sick system.
Or reduce the amount of influence money can have on an election. Reducing the government's power will just enable them to continue skirting around the law. If the government has no teeth, then why would any business (or anyone for that matter) follow any rule to it's fullest.
Re: Paradise Papers: Dear Tim Cook
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, the only sane solution to this is a massive overhaul of international tax law. Shaming companies just isn't a scalable solution in any way. There's a massive opposition against this both from multinationals and tax haven countries though - this article is a good way to start making it obvious to normal citizens that this issue should be on the ballot.
It's tough when the "only sane solution" also happens to be a enormous task to even begin talking about. I agree with you, but I also struggling to imagine a time when that overhaul could take place.
I agree, it's a massive undertaking and getting support for something like that is really, really hard. The way I see it, all of that anti-globalism rage that is currently being directed toward foreigners really ought to be directed toward fixing this, since this would actually help (e.g. have more money for a wellfare system to handle unemployment from outsourcing and automation). But unfortunately it's much easier directing rage toward 'weird people with other skin tones and religion' than something abstract like a broken international tax system.