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Apple Should Pay More Tax, Says Co-Founder Wozniak (bbc.com)
mrspoonsi quotes a report from BCC: All companies, including Apple, should pay a 50% tax rate, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has told the BBC. He said he doesn't like the idea that Apple does not pay tax at the same rate he does personally. "I don't like the idea that Apple might be unfair -- not paying taxes the way I do as a person. I do a lot of work, I do a lot of travel and I pay over 50% of anything I make in taxes and I believe that's part of life and you should do it." When asked if Apple should pay that amount, he replied: "Every company in the world should." He said he was never interested in money, unlike his former partner Steve Jobs. "Steve Jobs started Apple Computers for money, that was his big thing and that was extremely important and critical and good." Three years ago the company admitted two of its Irish subsidiaries pay a rate of 2%. It has built up offshore cash reserves of around $200 billion -- beyond the reach of U.S. tax officials. In a CBS '60 Minutes' episode, Apple CEO Steve Cook dismissed as "total political crap" the notion that the tech giant was avoiding taxes. And on a semi-related note, presidential candidate Donald Trump said in January he'd like to make Apple "start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries." He said he would impose a 35% business tax on American business manufacturing outside of the U.S if elected president.
Got it?
Selective taxes are why we are in the hole we are in. If Waz want's to donate, there is an easy way for him to do just that.
Always easy to give away other people's money...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Apple has a new CEO? Steve Cook? Does he look like Tim Cook in a turleneck?
How about Woz pays less tax and Apple (and everyone else) pays less tax too.
Congress, collectively, should get off its ass (which is being incentivized to do nothing by corporate money), and reform the tax codes with a renewed and vigorous sense of public duty. Public duty to the country, people, and public good -- not their select few lobbied corporations who don't represent the majority of companies and people who are willing to pay their taxes fairly and fully if they can see that others are doing the same.
And stop picking on Apple. Though I'm no fanboy, Apple is just one symptom of the problem. Punishing Apple isn't going to fix the 10,000 other companies that do what they do. Reform the system in general, not prune/pluck at 1-2 examples.
I would bet that in closed doors, CEOs of many companies would tell Congress to fix the damn system and make us pay more tax, if everyone were forced to follow the same rules. Stop the leakage and loopholes that are benefitting only those who are rich enough to afford the lawyers and accountants who are smart at shifting money around...
If the Woz is paying 50% in taxes, he's doing his finances wrong. Earned income is taxed at the highest rate. Portfolio and passive income is taxed a lower rate. He needs to convert his earned income into portfolio and/or passive income. The less earned income he has, the less in taxes he will pay.
Steve?
>Donald Trump said in January he'd like to make Apple "start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries." He said he would impose a 35% business tax on American business manufacturing outside of the U.S if elected president.
And if Tim Cook and other CEO's resist, they go up against THE WALL.
All they do is pass along the cost of the taxes they're paying to the consumer. In the end, all taxes are paid by individuals, whether directly or hidden in the cost of the products and services they buy.
Do you actually think that Apple wouldn't simply raise their prices so that their profit margin stayed the same? In what world?
I think you mean Apple CEO Tim Cook
But, that is the problem - 34,000 pages of tax code specifically lead to all the issues. We need a tax code that has no social engineering and no exemptions.
If the government wants to encourage development of Solar Cells, they should grant money to that industry as a separate bill - all by itself.
The Tax system should not be polluted with all the 34,000 pages of BS.
We can debate all you want about progressive vs flat vs whatever, but if it can't be describe on one 8 1/2 x 11 hand written paper, then it is too complex.
Translation: to ensure our continued immunity to anti-monopoly legislation we should pay off the government.
Nobody should be required to pay half or more of their income to a government. If a person/company wants to do that on their own, then that is their choice. But there's no way anyone can convince me that someone else deserves half or more of the fruits of my labor. And in fact, I think the top rate should be close to 25% with no deductions.
And surely Woz is smart enough to know that if tax rates are increased for companies that it will only raise the prices of their goods and services. Companies can't and won't absorb that cost of doing business.
This is not in defense of Apple. I don't care for them.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The problem with forcing multinationals to pay more taxes on the profits they make in the US is they will simply sell all their products to a division in the country with the lowest tax rates at cost, do all the mark-up there, then sell them back at cost to the US division. No profits on the books in the US means they still pay zero in US taxes. With digital media, it's even easier, since bits can be shipped anywhere in the world instantaneously. Before you raise the tax rates, you need to fix the tax laws.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Call the waaaahmbulance! We have a severe case of butthurt!
Is this a 50% tax on profits, or gross revenues?
In either case, I think a 50% tax makes many businesses not viable. Across the US we have huge unemployment issues, and many young people are unemployed. This is a negative situation, and is putting the social safety net at risk. Companies move where the taxes are lowest.
It appears that many small businesses pay much more in taxes than do the large multinationals employing the double irish with a dutch sandwich
Furthermore, the US already has worldwide taxation that leads to double taxation, whereas most countries utilize a territorial taxation system. Worldwide taxation leads to companies keeping their earnings abroad to mitigate the double tax when they return them to the US
High taxes, unemployment, and high welfare can create perverse incentives for people needing income.
I don't think a 50% tax is going to solve any of those problems.
In summary:
We need tax reform
We need territorial taxation
We need to address taxation for smaller businesses
We need something like basic income that is more equitable
So the news is, Apple has named a new CEO?
Because these are the kinds of working conditions people like Trump and Sanders want for Americans. Will the suicide nets be tax deductible for American factories?
At least we can all sigh in relief that the people assembling these devices will have free college education. Thank you, Trump/Sanders! You only want the best for America!
Apple doesn't make the rules, but they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to use the rules to maximum net profits. If you don't think Apple is paying enough, change the rules to make all companies pay more, e.g. by eliminating R&D expense deductions.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Since that already gets taxed.
Then it will be spent on goods and services helping the economy, and not just be squandered by the govt.
Stop using curly quotes. The ASCII single quote/apostrophe is good enough for everybody.
I recently require the rules and regulations of my hoa, which has 15 units. It came out to 8 pages. This document is only 1 in the the 4 documents required (declaration, by laws, articles of incorporation and regulations). The declaration is 80 pages long. Again, all this for a15 unit community.
Why would you ever think that something as complex as taxes could ever be described in 1 page? I agree that 10s of thousands of pages is a bit excessive and should be simplified, by the way. However, anyone that says they can get it under 1,000 pages is either ignorant, delusional or just plain malicious.
Do you actually think that Apple wouldn't simply raise their prices so that their profit margin stayed the same? In what world?
This world.
You can live with lower profits. But to survive you must have sales. That sets a limit to how high you can raise prices.
In the real world law is complicated. You have to use very, very precise language and lots of it or you have a lot of unintended consequences. You're legal system then goes one of two ways: Either no law is enforced because everyone is afraid of applying the vague language harmfully or law becomes a psychotic crapshoot as laws are applied willy-nilly however a person feels at that point in time.
You might get away with a flat tax in a few hundred pages, but it's a very, very regressive tax. That means it hurts the poor and middle class while helping the rich. There's a reason all of the flat tax proponents are on the right wing in any country, and it's not just because us left-wingers like overly complicated gov't. It's because gov't and society are complicated by their very nature. If you try to escape that complexity all you're going to do is get dragged down by the ones who've long since realized that's not possible...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Typo in editorial addendum. Apple's CEO is *Tim* Cook, as it says right in the URL immediately following.
Measure twice, cut once.
I'm not an accountant but I've been paying taxes now twice as long as I didn't. Federal I ncome tax is a marginal tax system. Anything above certain levels of income is taxed at the next higher rate. Therefore Woz's Max rate may be 28% for example but only on a portion of his income above whatever the cutoff is for that rate. I pay that rate on some of my income but my EFFECTIVE tax rate, that is the total percentage of my income that I pay, is much lower than that. Of course add in sales tax and state income tax and that rate goes up. Now if one chooses to live in a city that charges taxes on top of state and federal and sales, well maybe living somewhere else is a better idea.
...purchasers of apple products should pay more tax.
I mean, if you run a business, and your costs go up, don't you have to start charging more? Or are they suggesting apple employees should be paid less?
I don't see any particular good uses of the tax money being collected by the federal US Government.
Having once been a US tax payer I used to look at NASA and the US military and think to myself "yep, that's what you are now funding".
So Apple, Google and all the big earners are forced to pay USG 50% of profit.
Who exactly benefits from that?
I own none of those shares but I'd rather see the shareholders get the lot.
> So why is he deducting almost $9000 worth of business meals himself?
Because when he joined the Party to take our money, he became part of the establishment. At this point, he is making more money than even Hillary.
Tariffs built this country, and paid for most of this country’s expenses for the first 73 years, without having to institute an income tax.
Apple is hardly the worst offender. In fact, Apple pays more in taxes every year than any other U.S. corporation. Why not question companies like Google or Cisco, who also minimize taxes by keeping IP overseas.
Or why not focus on FedEx, GE, Honeywell, or the many other corporations who get tax credits every year, so rather than paying taxes, actually get money back from the taxpayer?
This. He just wanted out money.
He used to make fun of Hillary for making so much money, but lately he is making even more. He is a hypocrite.
/nt
For the recent decades past and indeed right now, the U.S. has facing a job export crisis.
Someone above correctly stated that corporate tax for the most part is not passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But let's not pretend that companies aren't going to try to avoid this tax in any and every legal way possible. I predict this will lead to an increased offshoring of American engineering jobs as wells as companies moving their headquarters overseas. Here's why:
1) If two companies CorpA and CorpB make products that compete with each other, and CorpA is American and pays 40% tax on profits in America while CorpB (who has no American offices or employees) doesn't, that's is huge incentive for CorpA to eliminate its American offices to get on a level playing field with their competitor CorpB - especially if America is a lucrative market.
2) There are many reasons for corporations moving manufacturing overseas, but one of them is for tax reasons. One of the biggest ways that corporations dodge tax is they list their U.S. engineering jobs as a corporate expense, and the overseas manufacturing arm as the true money maker - hence the profit is all overseas, and sales in America are offset by the huge engineering expense. Every incentive counts, and removing one that encourages overseas manufacturing is always a plus.
I would suggest elimination of corporate tax and replace it with a national sales tax that levels the playing ground between American and foreign companies. It will also remove a barrier to invest foreign profits in the U.S. - instead of paying tax when those profits are moved to U.S. soil, that tax will be realized only when U.S. sales increase which is much less risky from an ROI perspective.
Haha, "Steve Cook"
We all know that the corporations pass on all their costs, regulatory, tax and inputs to the customers, the poor. Quit lying.
Progressives should really make up their minds whether corporations are people or not. They can't have their cake and eat it too!
Woz is trying hard to look like the "Blue Collar Joe" on the curb, but no one is buying it! 'Estimated' net worth, $100 million. Not bad, very livable, for Apple Computer #1 Employee. [WHAT THE FUCK! Oh yes. Steve Jobs is #2 employee of Apple Computer Inc. What happened when Apple Computer Inc. became Apple Inc.?"] Steve "Uber Asshole who for years denied association with his lov chile Lisa, that he named his first "computer" after, the Lisa" Jobs, about $8 Billion. Timothy "Top Queer" Donald Cook, well ... errr .... , that $ 300 Billion sitting in China, is about to be confiscated by China Government Authorities, so his net worth is in "Flux". Hay, he can still make at least $50 a night, depends on the number of sucks per hour, being a Gay Prostitute in the Tenderloin District of SF. Hay, if he can use BART as a 'Mobile' Office, then there could be some extra dollar bills incoming.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-early-employees-2011-5#1-steve-wozniak-was-the-technical-expert-10
The typo 'Steve' as in Steve Cook, is both funny and probably a Freudian Slip "of the Timmy tongue" at the Climax. Snark Snark XD
Hay Timmy, if U go Pro, Take Ur Anti-AIDS Pills, Ha ha.
Timmy so mad now He johnson-in to thermo nuke me. Ha ha
That's what really burns me about this scapegoating of Apple. Say what you will about the money staying overseas - it was at least earned overseas by selling physical products overseas. Google has actually signed large chunks of their intellectual property over to offshore subsidiaries in order to dodge taxation of it. That is straight-up smoke and mirrors.
Corporations don't pay taxes, they only collect them. That 50% you're calling for comes out of the shareholders' pockets.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
apple ceo steve cook? did he change his name from tim overnight?
The clock is ticking.
So the US should just load all it's capital up into a wheelbarrow and dump it out over the border? No thanks.
Apple CEO Steve Cook? Wow!
If a legitimate business meal deduction was on a Republicanâ(TM)s tax return, you can bet that Sanders would be railing against it as just another âoefat catâ ripping off the U.S. Treasury. So why is he deducting almost $9000 worth of business meals himself?
Wow. That's about as textbook a straw man as you could ever hope to see. "We're just going to make up something we think someone else would say and then criticise them for it".
If the worst thing they can find in Bernie's tax return is that, he practically deserves a sainthood.
Seriously, corporate taxes are too easy to hide.
It is time to cut the tax breaks, cut the not paying taxes when offshore, and at the same time, cut the taxes. By having corporations pay increasing tax up to 20%, we would see more money.
At the same time, we need to change the dividend tax to 30%. IOW, it should be at similar level as what is paid for wages.
Ideally, we would ALSO prohibit all executives from owning publicly traded stock in their industry. By doing that, they can properly manage the company.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seriously? A 50% tax rate? That's highway robbery. It's an insane amount of money to pay for a government. I know he's probably talking about the marginal rate not the effective rate but it's still just nuts.
Historically, we've collected something like 18-19% of GDP in tax revenue. Even that seems pretty high to me. I'd be much happier at 10%.
(I'm trying to do the math from memory. I think Apple has a net margin of something like 25% which means paying half of that would give them an effective tax rate of 12.5%. That's a little high given that everyone pays an additional tax on whatever they receive as dividends. But this is Apple we're talking about, which has the highest net margins of any company I've ever heard of. Most companies are delighted with a net profit of 7-8%.)
How many Steves are there?
Paying tax in the US when it could have been avoided makes them complicit with all the evil things the US government does with it (killing people, bullying other countries, mass surveillance/industrial espionage, support of dictatorships and rogue states, etc.).
Please read the parent post then reread mine. I already addressed that.
All corporate taxes are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher price, employee in the form of lower salary or investors in the form of lower profits. Corporate taxes only serve to benefit politicians who can hide the tax from voters and solicit cash from corporations in exchanged for special treatment. Come on people you're smarter than this!
....just write another check for whatever you think Apple "owes" and send it in.
Probably get dinner with Obama out of it.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Companies should pay income tax, OR their shareholders should, But NOT both, otherwise the shareholders are paying tax TWICE for the same profits (Once when the company makes them, And again when the shareholder is paid their dividends, Or they sell their units to realize the value increased by the company's profit).
Also, it is probably preferable that only the shareholders should pay the tax, Because making the company pay the tax is unfair to Low-income shareholders who would be in a lower income tax bracket.
Also, making the company itself pay income tax is unfair to "Qualified investors" such as Retirement accounts which are supposed to be Tax-Free or Deferred Tax in order to help Low-Income/Middle-class people to provide for their financial needs in retirement, when they will be too old to work.
I think the main problem with tax exemptions etc. is that the net result of it is allegedly regressive taxing. More complexity allows for more loopholes, usually benefitting those who set out to exploit it the most. Lower tax rate on income from capital gains also reinforces the regression (as low-income people probably does not have this kind of income).
A simpler, possibly completely flat system with no deductions might be better for a lot of people. Better, in terms of actually making real taxation rates easier to understand and compare and less regressive.
He was asked twice point blank if Apple should pay more taxes and twice he avoided answering the question:
https://youtu.be/8c5u57SOVVw?t...
In a CBS '60 Minutes' episode, Apple CEO Steve Cook dismissed as "total crap" the notion that his first name is Steve.
We love you, Steve. Your contributions to technology and the computer revolution are real and substantive. Some of us owe our careers to you and the technology-based world you were instrumental in creating. We appreciate all you've done and continue to do.
Please stop feeling guilty for being rich. It's not appropriate. You deserve your riches because of all your successful accomplishments. More than that, your success serves as an example to others of how anyone in this country can achieve success by creating something new that's useful or by reaching for excellence in our daily lives.
It's Ok to keep your money. Please enjoy it. Have fun with it. If you like, you can invest some of it for works that will benefit the public but that's not required.
If only our government functioned properly and our capitalist free enterprise system was allowed to function properly, there would be a lot more rich people in this country and you might feel less guilty.
Here's a guy who constantly get quoted, but always says stuff that is really stupid. Is there a reason he always gets quoted? Go do something productive instead of wasting everyone's time. Jeez.
So basically no one is buying what Waz said!
Indications are that Waz clears $100 Million per year, which is not bad, but as responders pointed out he could be doing a lot better.
Funny typo "Steve" Cook. Jobs was pulling $8 Billion per year, and #2 Apple employee, but Cook's $300 Billion in China will soon be confiscated by the Communists. Had Cook re-patraited the loot he would have at least gotten $300k; but now $0 for all that effort.
And next week, Apple Inc. Quarterly Results! What a Shark Tank mashup that will be! Wall Street will eat Cook's shorts and Banana!
Ha ha
Not only are the Chinese moving quickly to confiscate Tim Cook's $300 Billion stash, they are shutting down Tim's Gay Child Porn App that has been such a huge money maker.
Had Tim repatriated the loot he could have gotten $300K (after China and US Taxes) and now has nothing. Moreover, with the Apple TV, iBooks and Tim's Gay Child Porn App all down, no more big money for Timmy.
Ha ha
And why are we listening to this loser chump? If he wants to give 50% of his money to the government that is fine. It is perfectly legal for you to pay more taxes than required by law. Go ahead, Woz. Pay my day. But wait, no, he isn't wanting to give up his money! He wants to force other people to do it his way! Ah...! How totalitarian of the Woz of Id.
Steve Cook. Is that Tim Cook and Steve Jobs love child?