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'Paying Taxes Is a Lot Better Than Phony Corporate Courage, Apple' (theintercept.com)
theodp writes: Every fall," writes The Intercept's Sam Biddle, "internet and its resident tech mumblers congregate for The Apple Event, a quasi-pagan streaming-video rite in which Tim Cook boasts of just how much money his company is making (a lot) and just how much good it's introducing to the world (this typically involves a new iPhone). This is merely annoying most years; but in 2016, when Apple is loudly, publicly denying its tax obligations around the world, it's just gross." Biddle finds Apple's use of the word 'courage' to describe the corporate ethos that pushed the company to remove the headphone plug from the newest iPhone while offering a new pair of $160 jack-free earbuds particularly irksome: "Removing a headphone jack or adding 20 headphone jacks does not require courage; engineers are very smart, but their job does not typically require much bravery. Courage is more often found in, say, running into a burning school to rescue the students and class rodent. Or, maybe, you could call courageous the act of paying the many billions you owe around the world into the system that ensures those students have all of the resources they need in order to learn and grow. Just a hint: Collaborative spreadsheet software doesn't count [introducing new real-time collaboration features, Cook called iWork a "very important tool in education"].
Whether or not something is illegal is simply a function of who is making the rules.
And this is the reason why the whole Brexit thing was such a fiasco. It seems like its strongest supporters don't even bother to be marginally informed about any of the issue. But hey as your er anti establishment um tory minister told you, we're in a post factual age.
The Irish tax system has been in place for literally decades, it's a joke that the EU is trying to retroactively change tax laws of a sovereign nation state
Ireland explicity agreed that they would not do this with their tax system. Are you saying that Ireland should just renage on the deal and quit the EU, or that the the rest EU should keep giving Irelend access to the club while they keep on breaking the rules?
Ireland can always invoke Article 50 if they don't like the rules they agreed to.
You seem to be one of those idiots who subscribes to the idea that sovereignty="do what ever the fuck you want with zero consequences". Well guess what, bucko, there's no such thing. If you act like a dick, no one will want to deal with you.
for a quick pay day
Christ Alive. You do know "the EU" isn't collecting the taxes right?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think they've outgrown that last part by a LONG shot, but can argue that later.
What I don't want..is the govt using taxation as a means to try to change private personal and business behaviors. I don't see THAT anywhere in the constitution.
If we would get the govt back to taxing only and I mean ONLY for needed services, like defense, infrastructure (roads, hwys, etc),, border security and more local things like schools, etc....we'd get back to having reasonable taxes that I don't think most would have problem with paying a reasonable amount. And that amount would drop if we'd quit having the feds and states suck up money to try to do everything under the sun and every speciality cause. The system just grows lately to feed itself and that's not right.
I have NO problem with an individual or a company taking advantage of the current tax laws out there to try to save THEIR own money. I do it as much a possible.
And for all those bitching about it out there do a couple things:
1. Get the govt out of the business of trying to mold behavior.
2. Get back to basics for services, this will lower the tax bill to everyone and make a more reasonable amount to pay.
3. If you don't like the current tax laws and "loopholes" and deductions, change the laws, don't blame those trying to use them. Hey, if we simplified the tax code, went with something MUCH more fair and easy to navigate (i.e. you made X...after expenses you owe Y%), then we'd not have the problems and no one would feel someone is getting away with something.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
How much of the current government's spending do you think are on those "unreasonable" things? I see strawman argument against things like the FCC (what business is of the government to regulate the airwaves?), FDA (safe food? Privatize that!), EPA (clean air?! pfff) and other such "things that aren't in the constitution".
Usually with the argument that said things, if abolished, would lower taxes. But have you actually looked at the FY2015 federal budget? If you got rid of everything except Defense and disability (FICA/Medicare is its own tax, so I guess you can argue for getting rid of those), you'd still basically have the same budget. Those "not in the constitution" things are in the noise margin in terms of spending.
Now, I could be persuaded to re-think FICA/Medicare.
Please don't lump us 1-5% people with those 1%ers. I know it's convenient when talking about fair taxation.
Once you reach a few million in net worth, it's like there's some magical barrier you just broke through where your effective tax rate actually goes down. Dramatically.
The laws have already been changed going forward. These types of tax evasions in Ireland, at least, are closed to new companies and existing agreements will expire in 2020.
This is actually a case of anti-competition. The EU is asserting that only Apple received the type of tax ruling that allowed it to hide profits behind a mysterious "head office" that wasn't taxed in Ireland.
It may be true that no other company had done this. But I don't know whether that can qualify as anti-competitiveness since they'd have to show other companies being denied such a blessing.
Or perhaps we should eliminate the fiction that companies pay taxes in the first place and just tax the people directly, thereby cutting out the middlemen. Any tax dollar a company pays to a government taxing authority is one that at some point in time will come from the price paid by a person for an end product. Everything else is just accounting games.
It is delusional to think that if every government extracted all the money they want from corporations, personal free cash flow would improve aggregated over a large enough sample of people. Every company would simply raise their prices and cut labor costs more to keep their desired profit margin and you'd end up spending your "tax savings" on every purchase you make. Maybe you don't buy Apple equipment - but you'd pay the higher prices on groceries, clothes, and other things.
Make America great? Eliminate corporate taxation completely! That would have the benefit of cutting out a big chunk of legal, accounting, and legislative burden in one fell swoop. Increase the income tax rates on the people to compensate. As Heinlen said TANSTAAFL - There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. While we're at it, eliminate sales taxes, lodging taxes and all the other B.S. taxes we pay in bits and drabs and increase property taxes to compensate. Reduce the variety of all these garbage taxes to just two (income and property) and pay them once per year and you'd see a lot better accountability from the people passing legislation.
Taxes seldom make common understandable sense, even at the US 1040 form level. I've done the long form, by hand, for my 3 person, two income family with $4k in stock ownership. Even with such a basic, boiler-plate kind of setup there were many places where there was ambiguity (at least to me, a non-tax expert).
At the level of multinational corporations it's all totally ambiguous. You basically have only the complex letter of the law and past rulings to go on and with a company like Apple who designs a complex product in one country, builds it in some others, and sells it globally, they have a wide latitude to define the nature of where and what they do for tax purposes and the only way their unique setup will get evaluated is by the ultimate arbiters of the tax law, which in this case sounds like the EU.
Apple thought they could construct a tax shelter scheme and Ireland was a willing participant, probably with backroom deals that Apple would guarantee a certain portion of the tax-exempt capital on deposit in Irish banks as a long-term deposit, enabling Irish banking to basically get a capital infusion.
You don't use gas, water, electric, telephone, or internet connections?
People get energy bills and telecom bills with taxes applied to them. They pay for what they use.
Work for a company, ever? That company was built from a civilization that benefited from government and the taxes it uses for those purposes.
Are you arguing for the absolute minimum taxes needed to keep civilization from collapsing? Or are you arguing for more than that?
Live in a house you didn't build from lumber you cut yourself with an axe you made yourself from a rock and a stick? You benefited from government and taxes other people paid into it in numerous ways.
The builder paid and passed it on to the cost of the home buyer. It's already paid. There's no need for the government to double dip and keep charging people over and over and over for something that happened historically.
Ever walk on a road you didn't clear yourself? Taxes. Government.
Fuel taxes pay for roads. People pay for what they use.
So far, you seem to be arguing that taxes -- especially income taxes and other taxes not directly tied to use of a service -- are much, much too high.
People who object to taxes don't hate roads. The main objection is to generous government giveaways to non-workers and generous government salaries and benefits to a privileged few government workers.
Governments are hugely wasteful and corrupt, but it's better than anarchy.
Tell that to the hundreds of millions of people governments killed in the 20th century. How many people did anarchy kill in the last 100 years? We need a balance, not fearmongering about impossible extremes.
So, they got Ireland's tax authority's "blessing" to not pay taxes to other countries. Isn't that nice. Getting a third party's consent doesn't give you the right to not pay taxes in the place where income is earned.
If I get Ireland's blessing to tell me "you don't have to pay US taxes", that does not affect my IRS income tax bill.