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How Apple Sidesteps Billions In Global Taxes
An anonymous reader writes "An article at the NY Times explains the how the most profitable tech company in the world becomes even more profitable by finding ways to avoid or minimize taxes. Quoting: 'Apple's headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company's profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains. California's corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada's? Zero. ... As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world. ... Without such tactics, Apple's federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study (PDF) by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent."
Good citizens pay their fair share, so it must be asked: why does Apple hate America?
Just imagine all the mandates they can fund if they had all this money
Good for Apple.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
I mean, I know it's the fashion to bag Apple now they're the biggest company in the world, but I thought it was common knowledge that virtually all big companies do everything they can to avoid taxes. In fact, I don't see how it's much different from pretty much every individual in the USA trying to pay as little tax as possible either. If an accountant said, "Oh hi there, I can help you avoid $3000 bucks in taxes and it's all legal" what would you say, no?
Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to avoid as much taxes as legally possible. This is more indicative that the laws are not written correctly, rather than that Apple is doing something "wrong". Of course, congresscritters might be hesitant to fix these loopholes, since a lot of their sponsors directly benefit from them. In fact, that may or may not be why they are there in the first place, but the saying "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence" probably holds here.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Oh look, another story that is actually about virtually every major company in existence but it's turned into a story by replacing "every company" with "Apple" to make it sensational and generate page views. *yawn*
Wait.. Apple paid ~10% in federal taxes? But I thought 'Merica had the one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world and companies were fleeing to banana republics to avoid them!!
So many injustices..so little time..
Yes, and since everyone is bitching about paying taxes here, there are plenty of people that have a problem with executives tax dodging because they have $1 salaries but multimilliondollar stock compensation packages. These are the same people that do the same thing with corporate earnings to drive their stock value higher.
So basically, you're saying that because the natural people who live in and benefit from the taxable location pay income taxes in that location, the corporation that lives in and benefits from the taxable location should not have to pay income taxes in that location?
Call me when you decide to believe that corporations should acquire all of the responsibilities of people if they want to be recognized as people.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Rich Liberals (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, GE, Apple) talk a good line about how we all need to pay our fair share (i.e. always more than we're paying now), and they become Good Liberals for saying so, but they never walk the walk. Buffet has been fighting a full billion $ that he owes for the last decade. Gates doesn't write checks for above his minimum tax, but instead employs highly paid accountants to minimize his taxes. GE hides profits overseas and you just read all the twists, turns, and contortions that Apple goes through to avoid US taxes -- yet we celebrate them as a company and continue to buy their overpriced trinkets manufactured by outsourced overseas jobs.
But do we ever hear about all of that? Hell No! We only hear that ROMNEY (who is paying his lawful rate) DOESN'T PAY ENOUGH TAXES!
We are clueless as a society overall. In Pogo terms: We have met the enemy, and he is us.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
fuck that, I'm going AWOL now.
Vote with your feet. America is a country with 49 other options for you besides NY/NYC. Quit griping and show them that they and their unions simply aren't worth the price any longer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You absolutely do not need to sell stocks. You can simply borrow against their value for your expenses. The only thing you end up paying is interest on what is basically revolving credit. That interest rate will be much lower than paying yearly taxes on the same amount.
You can take a loan against the value of your stock. This is not income, and is not taxable.
In many cases, the interest paid on that loan is tax deductible. If structured correctly you may never even make a payment, the interest is simply added to the principle (it is still tax deductible). When the time comes you sign over the stock (not selling it, mind you!) to the lender, having exchanged the stock for real property and taking years of tax deductions on the supposed interest -still without paying any taxes.
Its shady, but not illegal. Loopholes exist for the rich to take advantage of.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
I can't comment on the law in the US, but in Australia, that loophole doesn't exist. If I own shares, I can borrow against those shares. But the key question is, what did I use those funds for? If I used them to invest - buying more shares, buying property, buying bonds - the interest is tax deductible. If I used them for personal matters, the interest is not tax deductible.
In addition, the moment I sign a contract to hand over my shares to the lender, I trigger a capital gains tax event, and I have to pay CGT on the value of the shares at the time of the handover. The fact that money didn't change hands along with the shares is irrelevant; it's still a CGT disposal, and tax is still payable.
In my opinion, the US needs to be broken up into the individual states, and the federal government disbanded (so the state becomes the country, and what's currently the country disappears completely.) Perhaps two or three states might band together to form a larger country, but the US as a whole is too big; it encourages cronyism and corruption.
"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."
Now, you may think the law should demand more. I would disagree with you. I don't resent Apple their ability to avoid taxation, any more than I would resent a friend who managed to escape a thief or mugger with minimal damage or loss.
No, Apple sells a physical product, which limits their ability to minimize their taxes through holding companies in other jurisdictions. That is the one and only reason they pay more taxes.
Microsoft's product is all intellectual property which, even when licensed, has no physical manifestation in higher-tax jurisdictions. That means it can be held (and thus profit generated from it based) in low-tax jurisdictions. The company in the US then licenses its own technology, thus incurring a tax loss in the US.
You can't do that the same way with a physical product.
Every company has to recoup its costs which includes taxes.
You can tax corporations as much as you want and they will just pass the tax on to their customers. In Ohio, we have a Corporate Activity Tax that is, by law, not to be passed on to customers but some companies do it anyway (no, I can't prove it so I won't name names).
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Apple hasn't paid dividends on any of their massive profits so far (though that is changing in the future). Even when they will, it will be a TINY fraction of their net income.
And capital gains taxes on investments has little to do with the profit of a company. Plenty of companies don't make a profit and their stock still goes up (since stock price reflects expected value, not current value). And you can make money selling a stock short when it goes down, which has even less to do with the company's profits (or at best is inversely proportional). In the end it's little more than gambling, and should be taxed as such (ie. normal income rates).
Most of the loopholes require a lot of money or assets.
It's kind of hard to live off of cash you borrowed against your stock holdings if your stock holdings are worth less than your living expenses.
And moving your money to an off-shore tax haven only makes sense if your tax savings would be larger than the accountant's fees you'd have to pay to do so, plus the amount of the risk of any changes in the tax code here or there.
Apple's legal and finance departments know their stuff, and the company is fulfilling its fiduciary duty to the shareholders (like me). I don't see why the legacy media dregs at the NYT have any issue with that, but who cares what they say?
Every dollar that Apple can keep out of government's hands is a dollar that won't be spent on killing people I have no quarrel with, paying goons to grope old ladies, or harassing terminally ill patients who need pain relief.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's not like Apple's the only corporation guilty of evading criminal amounts of taxes. Google never pays higher than 5%, News Corp never pays more than 2% (the same guys who use Fox News to complain about taxes being too high on the rich), General Electric paid nothing and got $3 billion in tax credits, oil companies receive stupid amounts of subsidies, Amazon still ignores most sales taxes, Microsoft always pays in the single digits as well; the list goes on and on and on. Over 2/3 of major US corporations have NO tax liabilities.
Yet these same corporations still pay MOST of the taxes they owe in other OECD countries. The difference between the US and the rest of the developed world is that we're the only country with a tax system that considers GLOBAL business activities liable to taxation (obviously there are exceptions in other countries, such as INCREASED taxes for foreign employment or pollution). Other OECD countries only tax businesses based on DOMESTIC business activities. But in order to avoid having our global taxing system cause foreign business activities from having negative net profits from piled tax rates, Congress throws in a bunch of loopholes to negate the whole thing. Only it ends up negating almost all taxes on domestic activities too. This isn't an accident.
Sounds very high.
30 of 280 Fortune 500 companies paid no federal tax in 2008-10; 26 of those paid no federal tax in 2008-11; 24 paid less than 4% federal tax in 2011 alone; 15 paid 0% or less
Apple doesn't even make the list...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
that's borderline illegal AND morally corrupt.
No, the moral issue is the taxation. Your diatribe above presumes that a company's revenues belong to the state.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
and have the arrogance to think you don't owe anything to anyone.
Sums up a lot of what's wrong with things, ATM.
Yup, because Apple in no way benefits from access to the Silicon Valley job market. They could hire all those programmers in Bangalore instead, but they choose to support the Silicon Valley economy out of a sense of generosity and community spirit.
Loopholes exist for everyone, including the guy you replied to. People smart enough to use them become rich. People that are not smart enough whine about it.
Bullshit. You have to be rich to begin with to use such "loopholes".
Tell me, struggling to pay my rent each month with no savings, how I am supposed to use loopholes to become rich"? I don't need less tax, I need more income.
In my opinion, the US needs to be broken up into the individual states, and the federal government disbanded (so the state becomes the country, and what's currently the country disappears completely.) Perhaps two or three states might band together to form a larger country, but the US as a whole is too big; it encourages cronyism and corruption.
we tried that, caused the civil war, and since the federal govt won it now has overwhelming power and the states don't mean much anymore. It's caused some huge problems, like California legalized pot dispensaries but the fed government keeps coming in and arresting the operators who are running legal businesses:
"Federal prosecutors are cracking down on some pot dispensaries in California, warning the stores that they must shut down in 45 days or face criminal charges and confiscation of their property even if they are operating legally under the state's 15-year-old medical marijuana law."
but don't worry, we'll do what we always do: sue until we get what we want
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You're ignoring the entire lifecycle. There is no free lunch (as those who borrowed against their homes based on inflated real estate valuations discovered).
Eventually you owe the money you borrowed even if you got a good interest rate because you provided good collateral.
If you had cash laying around when you originally borrowed the money, likely you would have used that instead of borrowing money. Obviously, though, if you can get, on a post tax basis, a better risk adjusted ROI on that cash than the interest rate on your loan, you should invest that cash instead -- in which case, it's not "cash" anymore available to repay the loan.
When it comes time to pay your loan, you therefore need to liquidate some assets to make the repayment - then, if you made any gains, you owe taxes. If you lost money, you would have been better off selling that asset earlier and generated some cash so you didn't need to borrow (as much) money in the first place.
If the stock you used as collateral goes down enough, you may need to repay the loans immediately - indeed, in some circumstances, the entity who made the loan has the right to sell the collateral to recoup what you owe if you don't come up with additional collateral on demand.That sale of course will, if the collateral has appreciated since you bought it, result in taxation.
The "dodge" you describe is really just leverage -- which can backfire.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Speaking of bitching about paying taxes, I don't understand the mantra of "higher taxes means people won't invest in job creation" etc... Lets say you're a billionaire and pay 15% tax on your investments that earn you $50M/year. If the tax rate gets raised to 30% does that mean you're going to pull out of all your investments to avoid that extra 15% of taxes...and lose out on the frikkin 70% you still would have made!?!? Bullshit. I guess there is always the "they'll just take their money off shore crap.
You typically own capital gains tax on your gain in the collateral that was forfeited - just as if you sold the collateral and used the proceeds to pay off the loan. See, for example, this (specifically, the section entitled 6. Question: “What happens if I default on the loan?” or “What are the tax consequences?”) for what happens in one case of such loans.
If you really believe things work the way you describe, I suggest you check with qualified tax advisers before acting on those beliefs.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You can walk into a bank and borrow $1,000,000,000 against the stock, but a loan isn't "income". You then use that money at a grocery store. 50 years later, when you are dead, your estate covers the loan with stock that is sold, and nobody pays tax on it.
Learn to love Alaska
Why should california get a share of profits not made in california? Apple already supllies a large number of high earning employees that pay a high income tax rate, and if california has waived any other sort of taxes in order to have them headquarter there, then california has already worked out they will be better off with all that income tax minus the land and property taxes they waive, than without any of it at all. But why should california get to tax the profits earned in nevada? This is why states having corporate taxes is dumb, there should be a federal tax that is distributed to the states, in a fair and equitable way.
Not like it is done here in Australia. Here the government takes the taxes paid by some states and gives it to others. There might be a justification to give a better share to poorer states, but here it is taken from the big earning states that don't have great infrastructure and given to the ones that are the most developed! apparently they can't pay for the upkeep of all the nice stuff they have bought.
You borrow money from a made up corporation and you buy their stock, by the time their stock goes down by the amount you borrowed, your loan will be deleted from the books, ensuring the corp. operates at a loss and so their stock goes down. You use the stock loss to offset your other stock gains. Now you've got free money, tax free.
I live in a country where corporations have market in operational loss to distribute profit/loss among themselves to avoid paying taxes. There is no accounting trick in the book or not in the book that would surprise me.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I wanted to mod you up, I enjoyed your passion, but I so want you to look at your reasoing.
I am not defending Apple, it is about time you all noticed that Apple is given a pass by the media for using the legal loopholes that other companise are villified for.
--
Where do you git off blamming Apple or any other corporation for the disgusting acts of congress and the senate?
Those insane loopholes were mostly created years ago and are constantly polished by your elected officials to continually encourage donations to those self same public officials.
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You want to blame the person responsible?
Look in the mirror, then start voting like the future matters.
No brain, no pain.
You can't do that. If you turn over the stocks to settle a debt, you still end up having to pay taxes on the settled value of the stocks.
Really? Apple is not the only company who does this to leech every single cent it possibly can without "playing fair", but besides that this is the company who's douche in chief would buy a new car every 6 months just to avoid whee taxes, or denied claim for years on his own daughter living in pretty poor conditions even going as far as saying
"sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child."
partly to not pay up, partly because he had zero responsibility to anyone but himself. You think he gave a shit about federal taxes, or what corporate culture that grew into?
Why bother changing now, nothing has been done, nothing will be done, apparently it works, and the second anyone suggest's that they pay up it gets spun into "killing American companies/jobs with the ternary of socialism"
now get off my lawn
You go to school? Ride public transportation? Use public anything? Get Federal taxes back in addition of what you paid? You are using the "loop holes" too That stuff is in magically pulled out of the air, it costs alot of money.
Not doing this would be a breach of fiduciary duty. As a shareholder, I would not approve them putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage by not using tax optimization permitted by law. As a citizen, I want the loopholes closed, however, so that everyone plays by the same rules.
You don't understand it because it's bullshit.
The essence of the argument is that if millionaires had more money to spare they would use it to employ people regardless of the ROI for that employment. That if a corporation encounters another 50 grand extra cash it will hire someone with it. Never mind that money spent on starting up a new idea can already be deducted from your taxes and that Reagan dropping the highest tax rate from 70% to 35% didn't lead to any dramatic job creation. There's an argument to be made that certain activities which are currently not viable because they don't generate enough revenue to be worthwhile might cross the border into viability with a lower tax rate, but the number of those activities would be vanishingly small and would still have fairly crappy returns and high risk.
It's essentially an argument which ignores supply and demand. So called "job creators" act on the supply side of the equation, they produce goods or services which are consumed by others. As anyone with even basic economic knowledge knows, expanding supply without commensurate demand drives down prices. Now we can presume commensurate demand does not exist because if it did tax rates wouldn't be stopping companies from meeting that demand, so we can also assume that no one is going to increase supply regardless of how much money they might have.
There are a couple relatively obvious ways the federal government can create jobs in the private sector. The simplest is income redistribution, give money to poor people and they spend it increasing demand and creating Jobs(though not necessarily American jobs). In the US we don't like this because it's the wrong kind of socialism. It's perfectly ok to provide a moral hazard by socializing risk and privatizing gain if you're talking about rich people, but doing the same for the poor is unacceptable.
Another involves increasing workers rights by essentially eliminating "at will" employment. This doesn't as such directly increase demand, but it would make it easier for employees to say no to doing the work of multiple people, which would mean that the false efficiencies companies are currently enjoying would disappear. This is partly unpopular for all of the above reasons, but also because while there would be a net job gain, there would probably be job losses in some sectors.
Many other ways exist which would serve the same purpose, but they'd all be rejected in the current American political climate because in the US the wealthy have sold a bill of goods to the population convincing them either that they will one day be rich enough to be affected by the buffet rule and so should vote against it or that, and I honestly have no idea how this works, private enterprise would take care of them much better than the government does, how this meshes with the accusation that the US has become an oligarchy or the entirety of American history I do not understand. Libertarians seem to believe that the US has become a corporate dictatorship so as a solution they want to remove the middle man and go straight to a corporate dictatorship. Mind you, we are talking about the same voting population who 4 years after Wall Street caused the biggest global economic melt down in close to a century through pure greed and stupidity is objecting to the implementation of any kind of regulation of the baking and finance sector. The GFC should have thoroughly discredited neoconservatism since the ideology proved to be wrong in every respect, but 4 years later we're still having the same arguments.
That's why you put all your assets in what's called a perpetual Family Trust.
Those are tax free (seriously!).
Costs all of about $1,000 (including attorney fees!) to set up, too.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
You go to school? Ride public transportation? Use public anything? Get Federal taxes back in addition of what you paid? You are using the "loop holes" too That stuff is in magically pulled out of the air, it costs alot of money.
None of those are "loopholes". Public funding of education is not a fucking loophole, unless maybe you're a libertarian.
A loophole is the kind of thing this article is about, artificial arrangements to circumvent obligations. Not straight forward government funding for the public good.
Wait, the US has the highest corporate taxes... but corporations don't have to pay them?
I'm not clear what point you're making.
Vote? Even if there were real, viable choices, have to do more than vote. The Democrats are only slightly better than the Republicans. Democrats are merely corrupt. Republicans are corrupt and crazy. Don't think voting is enough to excuse you from being reflected in that mirror. Politicians can't afford to be honest if we won't back honest players.
I see people still banking at Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citi. Still buying from Apple, Microsoft, MAFIAA members, GE, BP, AT&T, Comcast. Still gambling that health insurance won't deny and drop us the minute we need it. We could destroy these companies astonishingly fast if we'd all just quit doing business with them. They wouldn't be so stupid as to push it that far. In mere days, they'd crawl on their bellies begging us for forgiveness, and they would quickly do all those things that they claim are so difficult to do, such as paying taxes, resisting the temptation to buy legislation, reducing executive compensation, treating customers fairly, and making up for mistakes. They do appalling things, and people shrug it off, or bend over and take it.
I'm in a little battle with a local city. They're operating one of those red light cameras programs. Naturally, they have rigged things to cause lucrative violations, rather than reduce them. They carefully chose intersections for which the yellow was already too short so they could truthfully claim they didn't shorten any yellows. How can I make them wish they hadn't done it? I went to a hearing with evidence that their yellow lights were too short, but no joy. Judge told me I could take up the matter at a later date in municipal court, as if going to a hearing scheduled at their pleasure wasn't already enough of an imposition on me. I declined. Now I don't shop in that city anymore. How many people have joined me in this boycott? Zero of course. I've tried to persuade others, but all that does is get them thinking I'm crazy for making such a big deal out of a petty traffic violation. A few concede that I've got a point, but still won't do anything. I should pay up, shut up and stop annoying others with my whining, and get on with life. Then some turn around and mutter about their cell phone contracts, or the cost of cable TV. Even the ones who also have been burned by these red light cameras still won't fight. Some even rationalize it, convincing themselves the system is fair.
An effective approach to clean up bad neighborhoods is a zero tolerance enforcement and clean up operation. Litter, graffiti, broken windows, and burned out lights no matter how trivial are all cleaned up and repaired as fast as possible. Serves notice that petty crime is not going be overlooked. The same would work against these corporations and governments. Don't let a red light camera ticket go because it's only a little money, and too much trouble to fight. We blow off even the most insane EULAs because we feel pretty good that most of the nonsense in there can not be enforced. We should instead make software companies clean that crap up. No EULA at all. At least we fight back against DRM.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Do you know what makes taxes rise and rise and rise?
Exceptions. Tax breaks, deals, whatever you call them. For everyone who doesn't pay his share, everyone else has to pay more to get the same total.
Some economist in Switzerland - certainly not a country you could accuse of socialism - made a study years ago that we could cut both corporate and personal income tax to a flat 25% if everyone paid them in full. Right now, the highest income tax bracket in my country is 49%. But the more money you make, the less you actually pay, because there are more and more ways to dodge it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Microsoft, Xerox, Amazon AND Google all do something similar.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/apple-corporate-income-tax-rate_n_1429955.html
"Apple paid a top tax rate of just 9.8 percent in 2011, the report says. Google paid a rate of 11.9 percent, while Yahoo paid 11.6 percent and Microsoft paid 18.9 percent. Xerox paid 7.3 percent of its income in taxes, while Amazon paid only 3.5 percent, according to the report."
As far as I know, Google has been doing this for a long time (somewhere short after it's founded I presume?)
It is just how the corporation world goes with the current laws and regulations, nothing immoral. You can't stop companies from moving their manufacture to the low-labor-cost countries, similarly, you can't prevent the companies doing this to reduce the tax bill. As long as it can keep the company strong (by cutting cost) and is legal, they will (have to) do this to stay competitive and (more) profitable. It's like water will eventually settle to the lowest spot they can flow to.
Buying on margin - the commonest form of borrowing on stocks - does not result in a forced sale unless the stock price falls ("margin call"). In that case you lose money, usually almost all of it. There is no capital gains tax on a loss, only the trivially small SEC transaction fee.
Borrowing money from a third party to buy stocks, or using stocks as collateral for a loan from a third party, is unwise financially and legally questionable.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Here's the simple reason why corporations engage in the behavior outlined in the New York Times article: _our income tax system based on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, encourages such activity_.
Thanks to all those complicated loopholes in the Internal Revenue Code and all the additional rulings that add up to around 70,000 pages of tax code, this is why you have millions of jobs, thousands of factories, hundreds of corporate headquarters, and possibly as high as US$15 TRILLION (!!!) in American-owned liquid assets out of the USA for tax avoidance reasons. Maybe it's time to gut the entire tax code and start all over again in one of two ways:
1) A 17% flat-rate no-loophole income tax, where the only loophole is a very generous initial earned income (wages and pensions) exemption to protect lower-income taxpayers (e.g., as high as US$46,000 for a two-adult/two legal dependent family), and get rid of the alternate minimum tax, estate tax, maybe the FICA tax, gift tax, marriage penalty, self-employment tax and taxation on bank account interest, capital gains and stock dividend payments. This is what Steve Forbes proposed back in 1996.
2) Completely phase out the income tax in favor of a 23% national consumption tax on all new goods and services sales, where business-to-business sales, used good sales, and college tuition are exempt from the tax. To help lower-income people, any legal household will get a monthly payment to cover the cost of the tax up to the Federally-defined poverty level (US$580 per month payment for the family I mentioned earlier). This is the FairTax proposal, H.R. 25/S. 13.
Under both of these proposals, American companies have all the incentive to keep as much of their liquid assets and operations in the USA as possible, since it is tax-advantageous to do so. An it also means vastly lower yearly tax compliance costs, meaning hundreds of billions of dollars spent per year in tax compliance are now freed up for more productive activities. In short, such a change will result in the next American economic boom.
He had another thing he did. Not only did he park in the handicap spot, ever notice that most of the cars he drove had temporary window decals? No permanent license plates? He worked a deal with a car dealer to "sell" him a new car every 60 days. He would trade in the "old" one, and get temp stickers for the vehicle. He never registered it, and so the tickets never went anywhere. Not to mention never having to register the vehicle with California. For all the "love" the fanboi's have of Apple Steve (blow) Jobs, he was what you might call the "typical" corporate asshat. Would do anything to squeeze a penny out of something and treated most employees like dirt.