Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 537 posts

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#321

Post by WatermelonApe »

SapphireSun wrote: post #317
jriot wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A headline that will never see the light of day.

Mainly because it's hard to suppress laughter if you think about it at all beyond a surface level. See discussion in another thread. I don't want to repeat myself.

Nobody cares enough about your "discussion" to CTRL F a rant that you're not even confident enough to link to.

I doubt you can think about this topic beyond a surface level given that it's unlikely you understand tax code beyond a surface level.

The net result is that Apple pledged to invest $350 billion in the US economy, capital expenditures that would have instead gone to their operations in China and Europe were it not for the long overdue change in US tax code as it relates to cross border taxation.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#322

Post by pavlov »

downandout wrote: post #196
threeseed wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that they are deploying that capital here indicates some level of belief that the American economy will thrive under this tax plan. This statement is fiction. There is nothing from Apple indicating this.

They are indicating it by doing it. That cash doesn't have to remain here; they simply have to pay taxes on it. The only reason that a rational corporation would keep it here is because they believe it's a good investment.

The main reason for bringing the cash back to the US is to pay it out to shareholders. They couldn’t do that while it was overseas. Now that it’s taxed anyway, shareholders will demand their cut.

Maybe the shareholders “believe in America” and will invest their gains in the country. Or maybe they’ll stash most of it in tax havens. Nobody knows — but it’s disingenuous to argue that somehow 100% of the repatriated money will be invested when America’s wealthy classes haven’t been doing that previously either.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#323

Post by tizzdogg »

jitix wrote: post #314
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not a citizen, you can at least avoid it if you are not staying in the US, as you'd be a non-resident for tax purposes. But if you are a non-citizen who is a resident for tax purposes, then yeah you are out of luck.

Yeah the latter sucks because as a resident I can’t even start a business here. I have to jump through hooves like Estonia’s e-residency program to just publish an app.

The expression is "jump through hoops". Sorry to nitpick.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#324

Post by jsjohnst »

tizzdogg wrote: post #323
jitix wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the latter sucks because as a resident I can’t even start a business here. I have to jump through hooves like Estonia’s e-residency program to just publish an app.

The expression is "jump through hoops". Sorry to nitpick.

Hoopes (yes, a misspelling) gets autocorrected to hooves for me, so could’ve been a typo and not that they didn’t know the expression.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#325

Post by pavlov »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #285
pg314 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to repatriate much of its overseas cash and invest it here in the US. Where in the article does it state that they will invest the repatriated cash in the US? The only concrete number is the $38 billion tax payment upon repatriation, which is a direct result of the tax plan. If you read carefully they state nowhere how much of the repatriated cash will be invested instead of simply returned to shareholders. They ju…

Well, if it's simply returned to the shareholders, then the shareholders will invest it. Economy wide it makes no difference, the money will be invested

What makes you think they’ll invest it in the US?

Rich person/fund X will get a larger dividend than before, and they’ll invest in the same way as before. It’s not like this money is somehow earmarked.

If giving more money to the rich were the solution to America’s problems, it would have worked by now.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#326

Post by dang »

nodesocket wrote: post #92
FigmentEngine wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://thinkprogress.org/walmart-fires-thousands-after-bonu...

This is #fakenews. Walmart did not fire employees, Sam's club a separately owned subsidiary did, mainly because the Sam's club business is not doing well and had to make hard decisions. It is widely accepted that Walmart had no idea Sam's club was going to do the round of layoffs when they announced their wage increase and bonuses. Also, thinkprogress really should not be cited as a source of quality unbiased news.

> This is #fakenews.

Please don't; it breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments. Your comment would be fine without the first, and perhaps also the last, sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#327

Post by dang »

SapphireSun wrote: post #310
rlanday wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this is exactly the same reason no corporation can stay in business! (Since consumers can just buy from the one that has the lowest prices) For this reason, we should encourage corporations to form cartels to avoid getting taken advantage of by disloyal consumers.

Ok, last one. :) You've really just made a mockery of the ideology of competition haven't you? In fact, that is what corporations do. There's an awful lot of highly concentrated market power lying around for exactly that reason.

Would you please not use HN for ideological battle? At the point this stuff gets generic, it gets predictable, and therefore boring in HN's sense of the word.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#328

Post by dvtv75 »

civilian wrote: post #297
SapphireSun wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of their profits is what the socialist would respond. :) They produce nothing without the working class. Managers can earn a modest salary.

It's important to have incentives to reward success. How would a business even grow if it could never keep profits? The working class does benefit from Apple, in the form of high-quality technology that even they can purchase.

I'm sold! I'll go in and refuse my pay check because my employer offers me high quality products that even I can purchase.

I can't, because I won't have the money to purchase them, but they are "in business to make money," and I'm clearly only here for the opportunity to buy the products that I make.

OK, sarcasm isn't especially productive, but I hope my point is clear: if my employer takes all the money and pays only subsistence wages, which the huge power imbalance enables, then he's doomed because nobody can afford his products.

At the very least, mine would be if he hadn't managed to get massive tax breaks for being a "job creator" who's also persuaded the government to subsidize those jobs with public funding, and then decided that he's not topping those wages up with the money his business earned. Basically, running costs are funded by the public while he pockets all the profits and pays me with my own tax dollars.

The working class needs more than just the benefit of stuff being offered for sale. We need to be able to spend and save, the ability to shape the economy and keep it running, otherwise it all breaks down.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#329

Post by cpollard0 »

An important distinction re: territorial taxes is that if there is no settlement of the difference between a foreign tax rate and a home country tax rate then companies are incentivized to artificially earn as much of their income as possible in low tax jurisdictions.

Re: Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes

#330

Post by Pulcinella »

IBM wrote: post #306
anilshanbhag wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

=> But if a US company earns income in Germany it pays both German taxes and US taxes. This is not portrayed accurately. If you pay German taxes, you claim exception for that amount. So if you pay more taxes than the rate in US, you owe no tax for that income in US. If the rate is less in the country than in US, you pay the difference.

Yes you get a credit for the foreign taxes paid, but even still it's absurdly punitive for being an American corporation.

I would not consider taxes to be “punitive.” Taxes aren’t punishment. They are much more like a membership fee.
Post reply on HN