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

reuters.com

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

#521

Post by thephyber »

relaxed wrote: post #477
valuearb wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Americans want to make iPhones, those are crappy jobs. We want more engineering jobs.

You don't speak for all Americans. Many would be happy to do it.

> You don't speak for all Americans. Many would be happy to do it.

Perhaps.

But if they took jobs with approximate pay and work conditions that the Chinese FoxConn employees in company-cities have, that wouldn't look anything like a modern American job.

It would look far more like an American coal mining job in the 1920s where workers toil under enormous pressure for meager wages and owe most of them (of not all or more) back to the company town for housing and food. This is AFAICT an accurate description of some of the worst working conditions of FoxConn.

And if there is such demand to work in such conditions, then how hasn't some enterprising American company started and supplied that dirt-cheap labor? There isn't enough supply of labor for the demand that you imagine exists.

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

#522

Post by nikdaheratik »

yodsanklai wrote: post #484
bnferguson wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you still have to file, which is not only a pain, rather expensive. My tax prep bill last year was around 1200 EUR in the Netherlands on top of my Dutch tax prep.

would it be hard to do it by yourself?

Yes and no. You have to do a 1040 no matter what and you have to include a number of special forms that you must get absolutely right or you deal with alot of BS from having to talk to the IRS. And that's just for a simple tax situation.

If you have income from multiple sources, some of which may be in the U.S. and some not, even if it's as simple sideline business, then it gets more complicated as you also have to calculate profit/loss for that as if it were in the U.S., then subtract your taxes paid in your country, and demonstrate that it's all below a certain threshold. And there's also payroll tax exemptions, etc.

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

#523

Post by nikdaheratik »

akvadrako wrote: post #500
cromwellian wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need to repatriate that. They have tens of billions domestically, and can use debt instruments against their overseas money. Who wouldn't lend Apple money at very low interest rates, given >$150 billion in collateral in the bank. Apple has already been doing buybacks and dividends by using bonds.

The bonds have to be paid back eventually, so it's just delaying the inevitable.

Except that they can just pay it with their overseas money in whatever form makes sense. On top of that, debt repayment comes out before the profit/loss that determines income so they could even use that to selectively lower their tax burden in future years.

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

#524

Post by croon »

dang wrote: post #520
croon wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you're right. I would edit it to italicized if I could, temporary lapse in judgement.

I've reopened the comment for editing and can delete these replies if you fix it.

Much obliged, done.

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

#525

Post by akvadrako »

nikdaheratik wrote: post #523
akvadrako wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bonds have to be paid back eventually, so it's just delaying the inevitable.

Except that they can just pay it with their overseas money in whatever form makes sense. On top of that, debt repayment comes out before the profit/loss that determines income so they could even use that to selectively lower their tax burden in future years.

Are you sure you can take a loan in the US and then pay it back overseas? That would be effectively transferring money from abroad. The whole point is to avoid that.

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

#527

Post by dang »

Jerry2 wrote: post #516
dang wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there many, or even any, examples of that? If so I'd like to see one. Really, all we care about is having the best article on a topic, where by 'best' I mean something like 'most substantive, while remaining accessible to a general audience'. By that standard it seemed obvious that the Reuters url was better. Anti-Apple bias doesn't enter into it, and frankly the idea feels a little absurd to me.

dang, every time there's a story about Google, admins here link to official Google blogs. Every time it hits the front page. And if thee's a negative story about Google, it's quickly buried/flagged/disappeared.

I'm sorry, but that's an absurd thing to claim. All I can really take from what you've said there is that you dislike Google.

For any $bigco there are lots of HN users who strongly feel for or against it, and they all have competing beliefs about which $bigco is secretly favored or secretly suppressed here.

People come up with highly charged claims about HN all the time and they're never true. They're in the eye of the beholder, reflecting how you feel, not how HN actually is, and driven by cognitive bias. I don't mean to criticize you personally—tons of HN readers do it, and I've written about the phenomenon a lot. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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

#528

Post by dang »

jnordwick wrote: post #506
dang wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overgeneralizations about HN are my weak spot! Actually Scott and I bumped three Google submissions off the HN front page this afternoon for that very reason. The goals here are substance and variety. To be fair, some of those blog posts are substantive articles, while others just read like corporate press releases, and the same is true on apple.com. It's strange how some users get indignant about certain bigcorps in…

I don't have favorite corporations. I don't think HN should have any content from companies about their own products (exceptions for things like mea culpa articles). While you may push back on some, almost daily I see content from Google taking up one of their products where if It wss on a Microsoft or Oracle site for example submission would never see the light of day. Google just hides their press releases in blog…

If you see it happening again you're welcome to email us a link at hn@ycombinator.com. We're open to being persuaded that an article is not as substantive as it should be to make the HN front page.

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

#529

Post by leakybit »

dmode wrote: post #148
Clanan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1,000 is not laughable to most people.

$1000 bonus is $500 after taxes. Which means, it is $40/month or $20/paycheck. It is laughable. Most employees will get $200 bonuses, which roughly will equate to $4/paycheck.

Where are you getting a 50% tax rate from?

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

#530

Post by burnallofit »

IBM wrote: post #350
Pulcinella wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it's fine to view taxes that way, but we should also realize that to a business taxes are a cost to be minimized. No for-profit business willingly conducts their affairs to maximize taxes. We live in a rules based system and the rules should be designed to incentivize the behaviors we want. Expecting any business to deviate from whats in their best interest is just... out of touch with reality.

Many public corporations want to (indirectly) maximize taxes. That's because taxes are levied on profits, and maximizing profits to increase share value is often a good thing.
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