31–40 of 537 posts
I love it. Apple gets to avoid paying taxes for years through accounting slight of hand, and then when they finally pay for part of what they owe they want a pat on the back for doing so. Corporations, man.
Corporations have a legal obligation to their shareholders to maximize their profits. If they did something as negligent as paying taxes they didn't have to pay, and that none of their competitors pay, they'd be opening themselves up to a lawsuit from shareholders. Laws are weird.
i feel like apple would improve my life more (better phrased as stop impacting my life negatively) if they would spend as much time making their products work better instead of boning up on their marketing and propaganda and giving themselves a pat on the back.
"Apple Plans to Pay $38 Billion in Repatriation Taxes. " Imagine headline like this under Obama, how much praise he would get.
You could also write the headline as "Most Profitable Company on Earth To Receive $42B Repatriation Tax Break"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No but I also don't set up a pretend subsidiary in Ireland that owns my intellectual property and pays me dividends for my freelance work. To pretend that they didn't go above and beyond to avoid paying taxes is lunacy.
> No but I also don't set up a pretend subsidiary... do you pay your state government the sales tax you owe it for all of your online purchases?
I love it. Apple gets to avoid paying taxes for years through accounting slight of hand, and then when they finally pay for part of what they owe they want a pat on the back for doing so. Corporations, man.
Corporations have a legal obligation to their shareholders to maximize their profits. If they did something as negligent as paying taxes they didn't have to pay, and that none of their competitors pay, they'd be opening themselves up to a lawsuit from shareholders. Laws are weird.
You could have researched that one pretty easily:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
https://medium.com/bull-market/there-is-no-effective-fiducia...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-...
https://www.quora.com/Taxes-To-what-extent-are-U-S-companies...
Only time will tell whether the recent reduction in corporate tax rates will have a long-term net positive effect, but this move by Apple alone seems like a good sign that it will. If other US corporations follow suit with repatriation, the American economy will experience unprecedented corporate reinvestment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No but I also don't set up a pretend subsidiary in Ireland that owns my intellectual property and pays me dividends for my freelance work. To pretend that they didn't go above and beyond to avoid paying taxes is lunacy.
> No but I also don't set up a pretend subsidiary... do you pay your state government the sales tax you owe it for all of your online purchases?
I made this mistake when I first starting selling online, which stung. Setting up a tax ID in Canada was very easy. Now that I am selling in the US, I am just beginning to explore the issue, and it is notably less easy.
So if you "get away" with not paying sales tax online, it is likely that the sales tax was simply baked into the price.
I'd like to know who those 9,000 American suppliers and manufacturers are. Other than Corning who supplies the Gorilla Glasses for almost all smartphone makers, I can't really name any significant domestic suppliers who would make up $55B of their "spending."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could also write the headline as "Most Profitable Company on Earth To Receive $42B Repatriation Tax Break"
That money was never coming back otherwise. So no, you couldn't reasonably write that. You'd have to enter an alternate reality where US corporations like Apple voluntarily paid the backwards, high US global profit tax.
I am not a domain expert, but the availability of cheap credit must have been a principal consideration, as well as the knowledge that a potential Republican president would offer an effective repatriation holiday.
In short, there are many conceivable situations in which it might make sense to pay such a tax - we're just not in one of those at the moment.
I won't address your last assertion, not having data, but I've read in many publications that the effective corporate tax rates in the US are far lower than rates in other countries.