401–410 of 537 posts
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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.
^ Not meant as sarcasm, just noting the possible reason the spellchecker gets confused.
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Some people make the (good? I don't know) argument that corporate taxes are distortionary anyways, and shuffling that tax burden over to income has the same effect with fewer side effects.
I think people like corporate taxes because people only have a vague idea of where the incidence actually falls. Clearly, at the end of the day, corporate taxes take money out of the pockets of business owners/shareholders, employees, and customers in some proportion, but no one's really sure what it is. Taxes that you're obviously paying are unpopular, whereas taxes it feels like "someone else" is paying are less un…
How realistic is it that a $5 billion fund can move a non-trivial amount of iPhone manufacturing to the US? Most of the BOM supply chain is in Asia, and assembly at FoxConn I heard amounts to 3% of the cost. It seems like Apple would have to build mostly automated assembly in the US or suffer severe margin reduction, and they'd suffer turnaround issues with the crucial components being still sourced in China. However…
Speak for yourself. I'm not at the high end of the income curve - not in the 1%, not even in the 10%, and I'm getting almost a $4k tax cut next year. I ran the numbers for my friends who are probably in the bottom half of the income curve (they make just over 40k between the two of them), and they're getting about a $1200 reduction. They were pretty shocked, since they'd been told over and over that it's not really a…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/upshot/tax-ca...
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Apple has $238 billion in cash in it's bank accounts. It was able to do this even if the tax code didn't change.
They timing seems awfully strange for that explanation to work. Remember, corporations do what makes the best sense financially. Even though they could do this before, they didn't, because it didn't make sense.
Like the article said, they prepped a certain amount and waited. Saving billions for doing the same thing but waiting a few months is a no brainer.
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US corporations are citizens except that they just can't vote... but they can contribute unlimited campaign contributions.
> US corporations are citizens No they're not. You're confusing the already commonly-confused concept of legal personhood with citizenship. > but they can contribute unlimited campaign contributions Citizens United ruled that actual human beings had the right to make unlimited campaign contributions and that the right to do so could not be rescinded just because those flesh-and-blood individuals decided to pool their…
No, it didn't. Campaign contributions are still limited.
Citizens United built on the established precedent that people unaffiliated with campaigns are free to spend their own money how they wish, as long as they don't coordinate with campaigns.
Citizens United ruled that this right applies to people who pool their money together.
Of course lowering taxes would encourage companies to repatriate large overseas cash hoards, but if that's the only goal, why have a tax at all? As a country the US has obligations to its current citizens and its future citizens and those obligations cost money. If we overly celebrate these windfalls every time the tax rate is lowered, we might not realize that what we owe the citizen is being forgot and allowed to e…
This is exactly the thing that renders me speechless every time this comes up in casual conversation. People generally agree that apple and other tech companies hoarding money in Ireland to avoid tax is Bad™. Then, in the next breath, they say that removing the tax burden to get them to move that money back into a US bank is somehow Good™. But what does it matter if the government can't take a cut? Why do people who…
1) Apple will spend it on capital investments (factories, campuses, data centers, etc.) in its business. Doesn't benefit the government, but benefits the country.
2) Apple will spend it on R&D / employees. Doesn't benefit the government directly, but benefits the country.
3) Apple will dump it into an American bank. That bank has a reserve ratio that is relatively low. It will lend several times the amount that Apple deposits to people or corporations who will do 1) or 2)
4) Apple will spend it on buybacks and dividends, which ultimately ends up in the hands of Apple's owners (you and me through our 401(k)'s, and probably a bunch of rich people as well), who will do 1), 2), or 3)
So, whether or not the government gets a cut, it benefits everyone who actually lives here.
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> The expectation of a large corporate tax cut was certainly there throughout 2017 No it wasn't. Most people thought that after the health care debacle that Trump would've pivoted to infrastructure. Especially given the tax cuts were so fiscally reckless which would've alienated moderate Senators like Collins or McCain. > and may very well have had a large influence on the Reno decision Apple has other data centres.…
> No it wasn't. Most people thought What matters was what investors thought. And as a follower of the financial/investing news, there was very much an expectation of a large corporate tax cut. > alienated moderate Senators like Collins or McCain Both voted for it. > not to do with macro economic effects The size of the tax cut was certainly enough to significantly affect the economics of a datacenter investment.
So without a tax cut Apple would have just let users suffer? Hardly. Users drive DC investments, not tax policy. There's no tax cut in the universe that's going to get Yahoo to build a new DC in Nevada.
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Speak for yourself. I'm not at the high end of the income curve - not in the 1%, not even in the 10%, and I'm getting almost a $4k tax cut next year. I ran the numbers for my friends who are probably in the bottom half of the income curve (they make just over 40k between the two of them), and they're getting about a $1200 reduction. They were pretty shocked, since they'd been told over and over that it's not really a…
Stop using anecdotes and start using data: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/upshot/tax-ca...
Url changed from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/01/apple-accelerates-us-... . Some of the comments below make a bit more sense if you know they were replying to that one. This is a bit of an exception to the HN guidelines' call for original sources. We generally prefer a high quality third party report on news like this to a corporate press release. The latter tend to read like press releases.
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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.