Report: Apple legally sidesteps billions in taxes
NEW YORK — A published report says Apple Inc. uses subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands and other low-tax nations as part of a strategy that enables the technology giant to cut its global tax bill by billions of dollars every year.
The New York Times on Sunday outlined legal methods used by Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple to avoid paying billions of dollars in federal and state taxes.
Yes, yes, it's shocking - a large corporation exploiting tax "loopholes"
in order to save money. All those OCCUPY[PLACENAME] hipster douchebags
tweeting on their iPhones were helping to support one of the ZOMG!
corporations that doesn't pay their fair share. If irony were a cudgel,
you could beat hipsters to death with this one.
This is why those of us who actually *live* in the real world laugh a bitter laugh whenever some starry-eyed prog starts ranting about how evil corporations should be forced to pay their "fair share". When a company can save some $2.4 BILLION DAMN DOLLARS, it becomes well-worth their time to pay someone (well, really, a group of someones) to figure out ways to save money LEGALLY. One of those ways is to base part of their company outside of the US.
Read that again. When the taxes get too onerous (i.e. when you raise them to insane levels to make those "ZOMG EVIL CORPORATIONS" pay "their fair share"), it becomes more cost-effective to pay someone to find ways to save money. It's a lot like some government agencies who employ people whose only function is to comb through purchase orders looking for discrepancies so that they can delay payment - every second they can hang onto their money is more interest they accrue. Because the amount billed was off by $15, they'll hold up payment of the entire $10,000 order - and someone makes a living looking for those discrepancies.
Funny, isn't it, that no one refers to what the government is doing as a "loophole" when they avoid paying a contractor...
That is all.
Read that again. When the taxes get too onerous (i.e. when you raise them to insane levels to make those "ZOMG EVIL CORPORATIONS" pay "their fair share"), it becomes more cost-effective to pay someone to find ways to save money. It's a lot like some government agencies who employ people whose only function is to comb through purchase orders looking for discrepancies so that they can delay payment - every second they can hang onto their money is more interest they accrue. Because the amount billed was off by $15, they'll hold up payment of the entire $10,000 order - and someone makes a living looking for those discrepancies.
Funny, isn't it, that no one refers to what the government is doing as a "loophole" when they avoid paying a contractor...
That is all.
4 comments:
Yeah, if a CEO can save his company billions by paying a bunch of people a paltry million or so in salaries and benefits, not only is it just good business practice to do so, it would be a violation of his responsibility to the shareholders for him not to do so.
The board would be perfectly justified in booting a CEO that deliberately avoided legal tax "loopholes" out of some sense that the company should "pay its fair share."
And, yeah. Economics 101: Raise the cost of doing business (like taxes or regulatory costs) enough and the company will either go elsewhere or go out of business. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure that out.
Corporations do not pay taxes. Period.
People who purchase goods and or services from the corporations pay the taxes.
I get the "glazed eye" look when I try to make that distinction.
I detect a hint of personal familiarity with government cash flow
Q
Pretty funny that (according to the news report I heard) Apple pays less taxes, percentage wise, than the much maligned Wally World. But somehow, I'm sure all those protest-this-ers, still think Wally World is an evil empire.
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