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Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

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Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#41

Post by distant_hat »

jacek wrote: post #8

Big corps love to brag about "adding jobs", but don't like to brag about the "tax incentives" they are getting. There are usually huge costs for the whole community. Austin tax incentives for Apple seem to be relatively small [1], but Foxconn factory in Wisconsin is an extreme case. I highly recommend the Replay All podcast episode on this [2][3] [1] https://www.statesman.com/news/20120901/austin-council-oks-8... [2]…

There should be an MFN like law to these incentives. Any incentives given to a company should be given to every company. The government should not be picking and choosing.

Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#43

Post by minikites »

underwater wrote: post #23

The chart showing the number of employees per state is comically misleading. They have tens of thousands of employees in Cupertino, but make the largest bucket represent "1000+" to make it appear employees are more evenly distributed across the country.

Not that it makes the chart any less misleading but Apple Retail is the biggest division by number and those employees are indeed spread out.

Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#44

Post by rayiner »

minikites wrote: post #40
ricardobeat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it tough? The choice is not between those 8.6m and the discounted taxes, it is between that and _zero_. Revenue doesn’t come out of thin air.

That's not the choice either. How about no tax breaks for companies, we enforce existing corporate taxes on those companies, and we raise the marginal income tax rate on very high earning individuals?

At the state and local level, that just means companies will leave your state and go somewhere else. In a globalized world, the same thing is true for countries. There is a reason France has an effective 11% corporate tax rate: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the... (Chart 2).

If you want to pay for the safety net, do what Europe does and tax middle class people who can't just move to a lower-tax jurisdiction. E.g. in Germany, the 42% tax bracket (just shy of the top 45% bracket) kicks in at around $70,000, and there is a 20% VAT.

Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#45

Post by bogomipz »

jpadkins wrote: post #26
jacek wrote: post #8

Big corps love to brag about "adding jobs", but don't like to brag about the "tax incentives" they are getting. There are usually huge costs for the whole community. Austin tax incentives for Apple seem to be relatively small [1], but Foxconn factory in Wisconsin is an extreme case. I highly recommend the Replay All podcast episode on this [2][3] [1] https://www.statesman.com/news/20120901/austin-council-oks-8... [2]…

it's weird to frame net new revenue as a "huge cost the whole community" Taking less money from someone who is building a business in your area is not a cost. They have a choice on where to build, and tax burden is one of many factors in that choice.

>"Taking less money from someone who is building a business in your area is not a cost"

Let's look at what that someone will be expecting of your area - working roads, a fire department, a police department, public transportation, a school system, a library, a park, emergency services. How is an influx of of potentially much more people consuming those services not a cost?

Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#46

Post by saagarjha »

TheBeardKing wrote: post #42

So glad we didn't have another public circus to select the destination cities. This is how the Amazon process should've gone. And good for Austin, it's a great city with a lot of tech talent, glad to see it grow.

Apple seems to have picked cities where they already have some presence, so there really wasn’t much for a need for a “circus”.

Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#47

Post by saagarjha »

adventured wrote: post #32
buboard wrote: post #24

Tangentially, has apple moved any kind of foreign earnings to the US after the recent tax cuts? Also, 90000 thats an impressively low number of jobs

90,000 is not an impressively low number of jobs. It makes Apple one of the 40-50 largest employers in the US and one of the five largest US tech employers. Back in January Apple publicly announced their plans for repatriation. While Apple doesn't give routine updates on exactly what it's doing with every dollar of cash it holds, they've stopped accumulating debt and have begun reducing it. Previously, for years, the…

You didn’t mention it, but I thought I’d bring it up: the majority of those 90,000 jobs are in retail, not corporate. So they’re not necessarily “tech” jobs.

Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#48

Post by matthewmacleod »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #19
ghaff wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. People can be generally pro-development and also oppose development that just consists of sticking tall apartment buildings here and there while leaving public transit, auto infrastructure, and other public works as an exercise for the indefinite future.

This doesn't make much sense. Transit follows population. You wouldn't build transit before there was a need for it.

A robust city development plan should incorporate infrastructure buildout as part of the planning sign-off process. For urban areas in particular, it's important to make sure that things like road and transit access, schools, medical facilities etc. are able to cope with increased demand. This can include requiring developers to make financial contributions towards infrastructure as part of that process.

You can't realistically expect to create substantial residential developments without appropriate infrastructure, and just kind of "fill in the gaps" later – transit infrastructure in particular has long lead times that make that impractical. In reality, planning of residential development and infrastructure changes need to be part of an integrated planning strategy ad the government level.

Re: Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City

#50

Post by perfmode »

rayiner wrote: post #44
minikites wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the choice either. How about no tax breaks for companies, we enforce existing corporate taxes on those companies, and we raise the marginal income tax rate on very high earning individuals?

At the state and local level, that just means companies will leave your state and go somewhere else. In a globalized world, the same thing is true for countries. There is a reason France has an effective 11% corporate tax rate: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the... (Chart 2). If you want to pay for the safety net, do what Europe does and tax middle class people who can't just move to a lower…

The fundamental problem is that capital is permitted to cross borders, but people are not. Not in the same way.

So, corporations can vote with their feet, but people cannot.

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