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With this big write off, Verizon might not be paying any taxes, yet again!

After reading the article, summary and the non-hidden comments, I noticed that Microsoft was only mentioned once. It was mentioned in the article, only in passing reference to reforms surrounding litigation.

This is ridiculous. Microsoft, Intellectual Ventures, and their trolls have been a tax to innovation for decades.

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In addition, they use their global footprint to avoid taxes on multiple continents.

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How can the summary and so many comments utterly fail to mention this?

I won't name specific cities, but it has happened a few times in the central valley of California. The one in my home town was built exactly outside of the town borders because no agreement was reached regarding incentives. I can see several links on the net about opposition to city council plans to provide tax breaks to Walmart and some other big box retailers, but I'm not linking them here.

Here are links which are somewhat political about this issue. There is a Walmart rebuttal to this, but it's on Forbes which is paywalled.
http://www.walmartsubsidywatch...
https://americansfortaxfairnes...

The reason they have large piles of cash isn't that they can't figure out what to do with it, it's that it's cash they generated overseas they can't move it to the US without giving 35% of it to the federal government.

They don't have to repatriate it to do useful things with it. Believe it or not you can actually do interesting things outside the USA. I know right? Who knew? Furthermore they don't actually have to repatriate it to return money to shareholders. Have you wondered why Apple has taken out loans in recent years despite having gobs of cash and no actual need for the money? They are doing it to shuffle money around without triggering a tax liability. They have $79B in long term debt on their balance sheet despite not needing a dime of it.

They can't pay it out as dividends without repatriating it, nor can they invest it in anything in the US.

Over 50% of Apple's business is outside the US. They can invest in plenty of things without returning a penny to the US. Furthermore just because the US has a high statutory tax rate doesn't mean that companies actually pay that rate. The effective tax rate in the US for corporations is actually below the world average.

the reason they have big piles of cash is because the US has the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world.

The tax issue is certainly a complication but it's not the elephant in the room. Not even close. The actual reason these companies have huge piles of cash is that it is REALLY hard to find investment opportunities worth tens of billions of dollars with a 20%+ net profit margin. There just aren't a lot of opportunities like that out there and creating new ones isn't trivial. Apple has revenues of $215B for the last 12 months. For them to grow just 4% they have to create a business the size of eBay (revenue $8B) from scratch. THAT is what is keeping their money in cash. It has almost nothing to do with tax policy.

IDK. If you discovered something in the tax code that let you pay way less of your taxes, would you consider it not "socially responsible" to do it and tell your friends to? Would you just forget about said discovery and keep paying what you originally paid in taxes? Do you take any deductions every year? Do you take tax credits that you don't need?

The deductions I find avaialble for my personal income taxes were deliberatly written into law AS deduictions. I did not walk through an elabporate maze to build a house overseas, or hire a squad of lawers to create a way to expoit this "bug" in the tax code.

If Apple were lobbying (and they very well may be, but we can't just assume) for laws in every country to stay as they are, that'd be a different story.

If they took the time to figure out how to do what they have already done, it's not much of a stretch to imaginge that they are lobbying hard. They are, afterall, a money making machine.

But we have Cook on record as saying "this is a Congress problem". And it is. Congress needs to change the tax laws.

That's admitting it IS A PROBELM in Apple's own judgemnt and passing blame to Congress.

Even if Apple were to choose to voluntarily pay more taxes, it'd be a drop in the bucket for the Federal budget.

The collective total amount of money this 'loophole" has cost the governemnt is a lot.

"U.S. corporations hold $2.1 trillion in profits offshore — much in tax havens — that have not been taxed in the U.S." - http://www.americansfortaxfair...

The only way to actually make a dent is to make them, their competitors and all the other companies also pay more in taxes. That's kinda beyond Apple's abilities.

Ture. But they ARE a part of the problem... not the solution.

So I glanced through the article and it seems to me that they're making a few bad assumptions about UBI to arrive to their conclusion. One is that they're saying it's bad because it's not tied to working like most existing social programs and there's little experience from social systems that are not tied to work. However the very reason the western world will need UBI or something like it in the close future is that across the board the western countries are facing a situation were automation is making many, many jobs obsolote and the rate at which these technologies create new jobs do not match that. It is pretty much agreed by economists at this point that a 100 % or close to a 100 % employment is an impossibility when you start seeing jobs such as driving and data-entry etc. disappear in the coming decades.

Secondly about the cost: they're saying that the cost of 219 billion would be too much, but really, it's not if you actually started making sure the companies and super-rich paid what they're supposed to. Look at the corporate tax revenue for example, in 2014 you got around 320 billion dollars out of it. However, we know that the effective tax-rates of corporations are far below the nominal 35 %, at 27,1 % because many corporations pay nothing or close to nothing in taxes.

Just by making sure corporations actually paid the required 35 % instead of the 27,1, you'd get an extra 95,5 billion. And we're not even talking about raising the taxes, this is the amount you're currently missing by allowing corporations dodge taxes. and that alone would fund nearly half of the program.

Then if you look at the state of the estate tax:

A simple calculation shows that our estate tax system is broken. Assets that are passed to relatives or other personal relations are often badly misvalued relative to what they cost on an open market. The total wealth of American households is estimated at more than $60 trillion. It is heavily concentrated in very few hands. A conservative estimate given the lifespans of Americans would be that 2 percent ($1.2 trillion) is passed down each year, mostly from the very rich. Yet estate and gift taxes raise less than $12 billion, or just 1 percent of this figure each year.

So you're essentially taxing 1 % of the 1,2 trillion dollars that gets passed down from generation to generation every year. This is insane. The whole point of the estate tax is to try and prevent income inequality from exploding since wealth once accumulated can create more wealth for its holder without the holder having to do any work for it. As an example say someone who is 35 inherits say 6 million today. Let's suppose he's not some financial genius but simply puts it to some safe index fund to sit and generate profit, let's assume 5 % PA, and let's also assume the guy in question pays his taxes, which for long therm investments at that size would be 20 % if I've read the US tax code correctly (and do correct me if I'm wrong), and after that spends half the profit he makes on living, buying things etc... so the total profit he'd be making every year after taxes and living expenses is 5 % * 0,8 * 0,5 = 2 %.

The average life expectancy in the US is about 79 years, so let's assume a period of 44 years from 35 to death. At 2 % a year, this comes down to 11,72 million dollars that's left in the fund, and this figure obviously does not include all the assets and mansions the guy has bought with the yearly ever increasing half of his profits I've assumed above, so in reality the wealth to be inherited is even greater than 11,72 million, that's just the cash.

This is the reason the estate/inheritance taxes are important when you have as much super-concentrated wealth as you do

And they may well pay the price for it and become irrelevant.

More of the "Do it the way I say you should or you will fail declarations".

I also smell another shill:

http://www.americansfortaxfair...

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/...

It's not as simple as lowering corporate tax, since that would cause us to go deeper into debt. Instead we need to make up that revenue elsewhere. The problem isn't just that our corporate taxes are high, it's that our personal taxes our low too. U.S. taxes are catered toward individual wealth instead of "public wealth".

We tax corporations heavily while taxing the populace (comparatively) lightly. To add some perspective, one thing taught to me early on is "you work one week a month for uncle sam" implying a roughly 25% effective tax rate... that's light compared to a large part of the world.

Sorry folks, we can't just lower corporate tax... We'll need to start taxing individuals a hell of a lot more. I say we start with the 1% and work our way down.

For an employer to tell their employees to do or take a political stance?

Not really, especially now that Corporations are people and have all the rights and less responsibility than flesh and blood people.

Its a two edged sword though http://www.hrcapitalist.com/20...

In teh case of a company like WalMart to "suggest" that it's employees vote a certain way, it becomes a WalMart issue, as well as a political one. There are those among us, inclusing myself, who have an issue with WalMart demanding my Tax dollars to subsidize their loww low prices every day.

http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/2...

http://www.americansfortaxfair...

So I think you can take away from the "suggestions" on how you should vote, is that they won't benefit you. There has sometimes been some pressure to remove tax exempt status from churches when their preachers tell them that they have to vote a certain way to be in compliance with God's will.

But if your company wants you to vote a certain way, they can "suggest" it, and in at will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... they can fire you for not voting they way they "suggest"

No not outlaw Walmart, simply tax Walmart.

FTFY

Walmart is quite subsidized to the point that it makes the 30% Mom & Pop pay downright mean.

How about we just have Apple (and many other mega-companies) pay taxes at a reasonable rate then we won't need to fund education from "charity" (plus don't forget that the $100M is tax deductable, so it part of another tax loophole. Details here: http://www.americansfortaxfair...