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Google Gives 15,000 Raspberry Pis To UK Schools
Grench writes "Search giant Google is providing funding to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to give 15,000 new Raspberry Pi Model B computers to schools all around the United Kingdom. Google Giving's partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a significant investment in UK IT education; it is hoped this will help turn around the decline in UK schoolkids going on to study IT in colleges or universities. The Foundation said, 'CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR will each be helping us identify those kids, and will also be helping us work with them. ... Grants like this show us that companies like Google aren’t prepared to wait for government or someone else to fix the problems we’re all discussing, but want to help tackle them themselves.' 15,000 Model B units at $35 each would run $525,000."
About half of Google's profit goes to income taxes, 62% to taxes in general. Last year, Google Inc. paid about $2,600,000,000 in income taxes on their profit. Then when those same profits went to the owners (stockholders), the stockholders paid another $1,500,000 in taxes on that same money. So about half the profit goes to income taxes. It doesn't stop there, of course. A stockholder who had a $1,000 share of the profit gets $500 after income taxes and they then use that money to buy gas, for example. If they buy gas, they pay another 12% gas tax, so they only get 88 cents worth of gas for every $2 originally earned. Maybe they paid their mortgage with the money. Property tax is about 27% of the mortgage payment on a house, so for every $100 in earnings, they can pay $37 of mortgage. The other $63 goes to taxes. I guess you think a total tax rate of 63% is too low. Here's the deal. I've invested time and money to open businesses and hire people for the last twenty years. To open a business, I have to invest (risk) money for an office, equipment, salaries for the first three-six months, marketing, etc. I risked that money hiring people to develop something in hopes of making a profit. Do you think I'm going to put my life savings at risk in hopes of getting 37% of the profit, if there is any, while paying 63% to Washington bureaucrats? How about when it's almost guaranteed I can't make a profit because Obama says we have to get the insurance that covers aromatherapy and crap, at a cost of $800 / month per employee? Hell no. I'm in the process of shutting down my businesses. That's what the current 63% total tax rate gets you - businesses shut down, people out of work. See also "California".