Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by kuschku » Fri, May 06, 2016, 9:42 PM UTC

whatok wrote: post #155

dragontamer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments do not have the expertise to participate as an psuedo-activist investor. Don't have an American bias when people share their cultures from around the world. There are a lot of governments, and all of our experience with the American government basically means jack diddly with respect to the German government. With that said, I do share your concerns, but I'm not going to make claims about a government I…

There's no American bias on this. If the world's activist investors employ extremely highly paid and numerous staff and maybe get things 50/50, what type of staff will a government employ that can do better?

Not all governments act like the typical government you know.

The German government, for example, owns several large banking groups, which act like any normal banking group – but their dividends directly go into the tax budget. (And they have to give loans at lower interest rates to the governments).

Normal bankers, in normal environment, and they’d probably never notice it was government owned.

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

#162

Post by DannyBee » Mon, May 09, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

shwouchk wrote: post #148

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%...

Yes, or increase the amount you get from others.

If you don't need them, and they aren't providing anything for you, they have less influence on you.

The way you be less dependent on people is ... to be less dependent on them. Not by being more dependent and trying to set up magic firewalls or whatever.

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

#163

Post by slantaclaus » Thu, May 19, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #106

slantaclaus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're called impact fees, and the dumb shmuck should have created laws to levy them beforehand

He tried and failed, which makes his position even more absurd, regardless of what you think of the merits of his case.

If I remember correctly, that was a special assessment tax for the particular development in question which Jobs ripped to shreds by threatening to move Apple's operations elsewhere in the valley. What they would have had to have done was to create a catch-all impact fee law to apply to all developments based on the number of new traffic they would create. This would probably be bad for business though.