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Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

theguardian.com

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Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#141

Post by goldbrick »

djschnei wrote: post #138
goldbrick wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to school, kid: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/property_rights.asp

If you care to educate yourself on the point I was making: https://fee.org/articles/capitalism-and-cooperation/

Ctrl+f "property rights": Phrase not found -- I really don't understand why I'm supposed to slog through such bloviating.

https://fee.org/search/?q=protection%20property%20rights seems pretty clear they understand the government is responsible for protecting property rights, which is a prerequisite for capitalism.

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#142

Post by goldbrick »

djschnei wrote: post #140
goldbrick wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see your dissertation then.

for professional reason (i.e. mixing personal social media activity with links to my professional work) I can't post that here. Against our social media policy, and is generally in bad taste. Undoubtedly, you will take that as "I can't since it doesn't exist", but I couldn't really care less.

Are you sure it's not because it's really in sociology?

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#143

Post by djschnei »

goldbrick wrote: post #142
djschnei wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for professional reason (i.e. mixing personal social media activity with links to my professional work) I can't post that here. Against our social media policy, and is generally in bad taste. Undoubtedly, you will take that as "I can't since it doesn't exist", but I couldn't really care less.

Are you sure it's not because it's really in sociology?

Are inverted yield curves and business cycles typical sociology dissertation topics?

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#144

Post by djschnei »

goldbrick wrote: post #141
djschnei wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care to educate yourself on the point I was making: https://fee.org/articles/capitalism-and-cooperation/

Ctrl+f "property rights": Phrase not found -- I really don't understand why I'm supposed to slog through such bloviating. https://fee.org/search/?q=protection%20property%20rights seems pretty clear they understand the government is responsible for protecting property rights, which is a prerequisite for capitalism.

Because you asserted that there is some invisible, omniscient, 'so complicated we couldn't possibly understand it' work being done by the government in order to keep the boat afloat. My claim is that that's largely a ridiculous claim. And the government IS responsible for protecting property rights, I never suggested otherwise. That responsibility doesn't afford them (we the collective) a blank check.

Is the irony seriously eluding you?! You're saying in order to protect our property rights, they need to further violate our property rights! For the love of god...

In one sentence you claim we never own our property, the next you say they're in charge of protecting our rights as property owners... You literally contradict yourself in one sentence...

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#145

Post by jamespitts »

stephencanon wrote: post #108
jamespitts wrote: post #59

Perfect article while the Life and Death of Cities is in mind. Apple could be a better citizen, and contribute a lot more than money to the city around it. If the company fully subscribes to shareholder theory, they will contribute only what the law requires. But Apple seems to stand for higher things such as design excellence and human dignity. The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderfu…

> The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration and lack of enough housing construction. The car-centric configuration is what most of the current residents want (if they wanted something else, they would choose to live somewhere else). Since they control a majority voting block in city politics, there's very litt…

What is "want"? And why does it have to be so immovable?

We can't always walk away from what we do or where we live. Car-centric, earth-wasting behavior is ostensibly what we want, because most of us engage in it every day. So is sugar soda and processed food, lack of exercise, and any number of unhealthy things we do. So is paying huge amounts of money for a house, then fighting any new development near our neighborhood out of self interest.

It is possible for people to essentially be trapped in a situation in which rational choices are a bad ones. How might we break out of that?

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#146

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Retric wrote: post #119
snowwrestler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations get a tax credit on taxes paid to foreign countries. This is where the U.S. nominal rate comes in. If it was about the same as other countries', then it would not be an impediment to repatriating profits. But at 35%, it's the highest in the world, so corps repatriating profits will indeed pay additional taxes to the U.S. government, even taking the foreign tax credits into account. That's why corps want…

The 'before deductions' part makes that 35% rate meaningless. A 10% tax on 10 billion is > than a 35% tax on 2 billion. Corporate share of federal tax revenue has dropped by two-thirds in 60 years — from 32% in 1952 to 10% in 2013. General Electric, Boeing, Verizon and 23 other profitable Fortune 500 firms paid no federal income taxes from 2008 to 2012. Our average effective tax rate is 27.1% compared with 27.7% for…

The problem is, for income earned abroad, meaning of the deduction that lower the rate domestically don't apply as easily, so you wind up actually paying somewhere near 35%. "Hey here is an incentive to do stuff in the states" doesn't apply when you aren't doing stuff in the states.

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#147

Post by Bud »

imgabe wrote: post #65

Slightly off topic, but is that really the design for Apple's new headquarters, a giant ring? So if you want to get from a place on one side to the other, you have to walk halfway around the circle or cut through the giant park in the middle? That seems horribly inefficient.

You might need to think more about what "efficient" actually means.

Apple did.

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#148

Post by shwouchk »

DannyBee wrote: post #103

So, uh, the city is already highly dependent on one payer, and the solution proposed is to increase the proportion that payer pays ? I guess i never understand why people think the solution to something having too much influence due to money is to become more dependent on their money. I can see no magic way to accomplish this without an increase in influence from that payer, and to think you can seems ... pretty pie-…

(I'm not addressing the article at all, just your logic):

By that logic, the simplest way to get rid of the dependence is to decrease their tax to 0%...

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#149

Post by vermontdevil »

imgabe wrote: post #65

Slightly off topic, but is that really the design for Apple's new headquarters, a giant ring? So if you want to get from a place on one side to the other, you have to walk halfway around the circle or cut through the giant park in the middle? That seems horribly inefficient.

Look at Pentagon. Max of 7 minutes to walk between any two points in the building because of the design.

Re: Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

#150

Post by ineptech »

apeace wrote: post #35

> Apple pays a 2.3% effective tax rate on its $181bn in cash held offshore... > ...shield themselves off from the theoretically 35% federal corporate tax rate Something seems wrong here. I don't think companies are expected to pay 35% yearly on cash reserves. Am I confused, or is the article? If anyone is knowledgable about this I'd be interested to know the deal!

The article is referring to the tax Apple would have paid on that money back when it was earned, if they had reported it as US profit instead of reporting it as foreign profit.
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