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Apple Pledges $1 Billion Toward Creating Manufacturing Jobs In US (cnbc.com)
Apple announced today plans to create a $1 billion fund to promote creation of advanced manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Cook told CNBC in an interview that Apple will announce the first investment later in May. CNBC reports: "By doing that, we can be the ripple in the pond. Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs around, those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them," the CEO said. Apple has already created two million jobs in the United States, and Cook showed no signs of shrinking the tech giant's reach. "A lot of people ask me, 'Do you think it's a company's job to create jobs?' and my response is [that] a company should have values because a company is a collection of people. And people should have values, so by extension, a company should. And one of the things you do is give back," Cook said. "So how do you give back? We give back through our work in the environment, in running the company on renewable energy. We give back in job creation."
Apple is talking to us like we're stupid, nothing new here. Those $Bs of jobs will go poof as soon as the Qualcomm battle is over.
Slashdot readers will do everything possible to avoid giving credit to President Trump for getting Apple to do this. Whenever a business pledges to bring jobs back to the United States, just about everyone here spins, deflects, and posts fake news to avoid admitting that President Trump won yet again. It's really quite pathetic how partisan the left has become. Undoubtedly, I'll get modded down to -1 for pointing out these facts by leftists who want to avoid the truth. President Trump is winning yet again and this is excellent news for all of us.
- snruter rotsac
1 billion USD is a large sum. Is it because they fear president Trump's wrath? Or is it part of a deal that involves bringing back tax-free some cash from offshore?
Part of what has made Apple successful in Asian manufacturing has been low wages coupled with conditions that favor the employer. Workers do not have overtime, do not have a lot of other protections. Some workers seem to essentially be prisoner to the company town, living on company grounds in company dormitories, shopping in company stores, eating in company cafeterias. That sort of thing is generally unacceptable in the United States.
American wages, even wages for manufacturing, are probably too high if the products are still priced roughly where they are now combined with the amount of manual labor used to individually assemble devices like phones and tablets. This means the alternative to all of this is automating as much manufacturing as possible. It may mean paying a manufacturing engineer a couple hundred thousand a year to work with designers to adapt designs to machine-manufacturable products, such that humans barely if at all touch the actual products being built- humans will be more likely to work on the factory itself, reconfiguring for new products or maintaining the machinery so that it keeps on producing units.
The effects of manufacturing will not be as strongly felt as they used to be. Sure some workers will still be employed at the factory, and arguably those employees might even be higher paid due to the technical work of maintaining the machinery, but the total number of workers won't be enough to support whole communities like it used to, and due to the technical nature of what work there is, the jobs are more likely to go to existing urban areas rather than rejuvenating rural towns. If the manufacturing was labor-intensive and unskilled then of course it would make sense to consider towns where wages could be lower, but that won't be as much a factor in this era.
Nevertheless I would like to see manufacturing come back; some jobs are better than no jobs, and higher paying jobs are good when the wages are fair for the kind of abilities the work requires.
We'll just have to see what happens.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Most Apple products are the most difficult to recycle. By design.
Who cares? The volume of Apple products in landfills is totally negligible. More disposable baby diapers go to landfills everyday than all the iPhones ever made.
You need to get some perspective. America consumes 20 million barrels of oil everyday. Don't you think we should focus on that, instead of worrying about what happens to a few iPhones? You remind me of my idiot neighbor who drives ten miles to the recycling center in her gas-guzzling SUV to drop of a dozen grocery bags that collectively weigh less than a gram, and thinks she is an "environmentalist".
How about giving back an actual pro laptop with something truly innovative, instead of that silly touch bar? How about giving back the MagSafe power adapter? How about giving back a laptop with a variety of useful ports?
How about giving back an honest-to-goodness pro desktop?
#DeleteChrome
Does Apple make baby diapers? Is it Apple's fault that the USA consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day?
We're simply pointing out that while Apple keeps talking about the environment, they're making non-upgradable, hard-to-repair devices thus putting profits before the environment - and that makes them hypocrites.
#DeleteFacebook
They did pay the taxes they were obligated to pay (sales taxes, wage taxes etc). Why would you want to pay an extra 35% if you don't have to? You don't take the standard $9-12k deduction on your Federal taxes?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
We're simply pointing out ...
... and I am pointing out that you should be pointing at something that matters. Apple products consume a negligible amount of resources. Their employees' daily commute has more impact on the environment than their products.
... and that makes them hypocrites.
Can you blame them? Many environmentalist, like you, focus on "environmental theater", so they put on a act. If you really gave a crap about the environment, you would be complaining about Exxon's refineries, Ford's SUVs, or Cargill's feedlots, and not focusing on silly trivialities like iPhones. They don't matter.
Donald Trump still makes his shitty ties in China, moron. His shitty kids make their shitty products in China too. No sign of them bringing their manufacturing onshore...
Even worse, Donald Trump's presidency is owned by Vladimir Putin.
...to offer to bring back a tiny, tiny fraction of the vast sum they've avoided paying a cent in taxes on so they can get some good PR and hope we ignore the rest of the money they've stolen from the US public. (And make no mistake, tax evasion is just another form of theft, with the victim being society.)
I'm no fan of our current global tax system and the wealth distortions it has created. But going around trying to label companies/people legally minimising their tax 'thieves' is not much different from the RIAA moral police style anti-piracy campaigns. It's childish, and discredits serious arguments.
Firstly, almost every western country's tax system is based on self declaration. We don't have tax inspectors hovering over every transaction you make, with the big eye in the sky then sending you a bill at the end of the year. You go about your business, and at the end of the year, you report to the government what tax you think you owe. In the vast majority of cases, the government does not challenge your assessment. It is an honesty based system (albeit with stiff penalties if you abuse it) and it tends to work pretty well. By claiming that all these billions or dollars are being stolen, you are insinuating that the integrity of the system has broken down. This is dangerous, because the next step then is to crack down on these phantom tax cheats, by doing things like banning cash, and having your bank account data fed directly to the IRS. Obviously this would have no impact on what Apple and Google etc are doing, because the IRS already knows what they are doing. All you have done is given the government a populous excuse to invade our lives further.
Secondly, company tax is nowhere near as big a moral issue as you think it is. Fiduciary duty means that a company is limited in its ability to live it up on income like an individual can (and perks like staff parties, corporate jets, are generally deductible anyway, so company tax is irrelevant). Net profits must ultimately be either distributed to shareholders or re-invested in productive activities. Saving them just delays this, but unless you save them forever, the company must ultimately 'consume' the profits by distribution to shareholders or investment.
If it re-invests the profits, then almost always it can claim the tax back over time through depreciation. In other words, it might earn $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, spend the resulting $8000 to buy a machine, but over the next five years claim back $2000/5 in tax credits due to the depreciation of the capital asset. Ultimately the taxman gets no tax on the profits, but the company has to lend the taxman the tax for five years. For small and medium sized businesses trying to grow off cashflow, this is really stupid. If the machine they wanted cost $10000, then they would have to borrow $2000 to lend onward to the taxman for five years. Indeed, many small businesses have to do just this, which is why most countries have generous capital allowances to prevent such pointless cashflow disruption.
Alternately, if it distributes the profits to shareholders, the shareholders pay tax on the dividends against their individual income. You might notice a potential issue with this - distributed profits get taxed twice. A company could make the $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, and then pays $8000 to a shareholder. The shareholder might then pay $2500 of tax on that, resulting in a net dividend of $5500 arriving in the shareholder's account. Of the $10000 the company made from a profit on selling widgets, barely half gets to the owners. People in partnerships (as opposed to limited companies) don't have this problem, which puts companies at a big disadvantage (even if you think such a punitive effective tax rate is okay). This is why almost every country has various tax credit systems or lower dividend tax rates to prevent this issue.
Now where I agree with you there is a problem is in the loopholes that develop when you start tryin
I don't mind if manufacturing comes back to the US in the form of automated factories.
Those factories still need bodies to keep them going. Someone has to build the factory, network it, install the machines, and keep them going.
Also, someone is delivering raw materials to the factory, and someone is shipping finished goods away from the factory.
Those factories are also tax ratables that help offset the cost of police, fire, and public education.
If automation is an unavoidable trend, I'd rather it be here than there.