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Apple Plans $1 Billion iDataCenter
1sockchuck writes "Apple is planning a major East Coast data center to boost the capacity of its online operations, and may invest more than $1 billion in building and operating the huge server farm. That's nearly twice what Google and Microsoft typically invest in their massive cloud computing centers. The scope of the project raises interesting questions about Apple's plans, and has politicians in North Carolina jumping through hoops to pass incentives to win the project. The proposed NC incentives build on a package for Google that later proved controversial."
Dunno about telecoms, but I think it's safe to call that the Walmart model.
Well, giving tax breaks to businesses is Doing Something, which makes headlines, which helps get politicians elected, even though in practice the case for doing so is usually pretty marginal. Great deal if you're the business, mind you. Check out the Dell plant near Winston-Salem which got a boatload of incentives, and then started cutting jobs when the going got rough...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Business taxes should be the first to go, because businesses don't pay taxes. Their customers do. The only thing governments accomplish when they tax businesses is they raise the cost of goods and services.
A) Why not abolish personal income taxes first?
B) What makes you think that corporations won't just keep prices the same and use the difference to pad their profit margin?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You can complain all you want, but if you look at the numbers you'll find the top 1% of earners pay 40% (or more) of income taxes.
And to put things in perspective, the top 1% nationally earn *440 times more than the avg person in the bottom 50%.
Not to mention that Maryland has some of the richest counties in the country.
*in 2007, I'm not sure what the 2008 number is
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Are you implying that many millions in Maryland left for other states because of the tax? Have you considered that perhaps there were many millionaires who lost a lot of money, and therefore were no longer millionaires?
I'm sure that the crash was a big factor, but it's quite easy for anyone in Maryland who wants to pay less taxes to just move across the border into Delaware, Virginia, or Pennsylvania.
I know several people who've moved out of California for that reason.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm in NC! *raises hand* Don't ask about the other hand....
"but consume relatively little"
hum ... that what they want you to believe.
Public investment, private profit, read up on it. It cost a lot to all of us to make them rich, the money comes from somewhere. And when the money does not come from somewhere but is "created" by the rich, we pay when it suddenly disappear, with our real money (see financial crisis).
According to http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/23408.html, the rich do pay a higher percent income tax. This only covers income tax paid vs. AGI, so there can be arguments about other taxes being regressive or sources of income that aren't taxable (or aren't reported). But from the standpoint of income tax this is a reasonable metric. For 2006, the top 1% paid an average of 22.79% of their AGI in tax. The people in the top 5%-2% averaged 17.48%. The top 10%-6% paid 12.60%. One could argue that the rich should pay even more, but claiming that they pay a lower effective rate of income tax than everyone else is just not supported by the facts.
If taxes were on revenue, and prices followed the idealistic supply/demand curve model, that would be true, because taxes would in effect be costs.
However, corporate taxes are generally on profits, i.e. on instances where the idealized model fails to hold, because the market price set by demand is significantly above the cost of production, but for one reason or another this has failed to stimulate an increase in supply to offset it, as classical theory would predict it should. In such markets, you already have a significant deviation from classical price theory, which assumes prices in a competitive market should approach the cost of production. Instead, prices are primarily being set from the demand side without much impact from the cost side. In those cases, which are the only ones in which profit taxes apply, a tax is unlikely to significantly change prices.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think the 'woosh' is perhaps for you.
No one is talking about sales taxes here. Those taxes are designed to be passed to the customer. We're talking about all the various taxes that businesses are required to pay. Taxes on profit, medicare taxes, social security taxes. I don't personally go along with the whole 'businesses shouldn't pay taxes' mindset, but I see where people are coming from. Is that computer that costs $500 going to cost less if the company doesn't have to pay tax on the profit they're making at the end of the year? That's the question. And personally, I don't think so. As that is too abstract for most people to see right away...
If a business is required to pay some tax--any tax, they will make darned sure they are selling their products at enough of a markup that the tax is covered. In this situation though, I believe it would take longer for the cost of goods to come down when the tax is lessened/dropped. Businesses would take a while to recalculate everything, and then figure out how much they could shave off the price to try and beat the competition.
There's no place like