The point about Apple hiring best graduates who got their education mostly free of charge cause of all the tax payers really shift my mind about the whole tax-avoidance thing.
To be clear, the taxes paid by employees are their taxes, that they'd be paying if they worked for another company or set up their own business.
Obviously there is some effect from Apple being an employer in increasing the overall employment rate, but there's a reason Apple needs local employees to hawk it's products. If they weren't employing and selling locally, some other company would be employing those people and taking Apple's market share.
Are there any statistics about how much of the value produced by professionals abroad actually flows back to the country of origin? Intuitively, I would say it is very little because why would you return once you live in much more privileged circumstances.
Yes but the moral burden is not on Apple, it's on those graduates. If you got your education for free and now you make a fat salary from Apple, it's your job to give back. Not Apple's.
Because a corporation is not a person? It's a collection of individuals, and if you are taxing all of the individuals fairly why do you need to tax the collective as well?
I feel like this is sliding towards a debate about the virtues of corporation tax full stop, which is a slightly different matter.
I actually think the idea of a moral burden could reasonably be extended to entities such as corporations, but let's put that to the side for now.
At some point in the process a decision was made - collectively, by people - to avoid paying the stipulated rate of tax in countries in which Apple had profited. These people benefit from the educational system in those countries, but they also reap rewards from tax avoidance. The moral burden lies somewhere. Tim Cook would have known about this decision if not played a role in it, in contrast to previous statements he has made. That is the hypocrisy highlighted in this article.
How is that hypocritical? Individuals try to minimize their taxes. So do companies. Except a company isn't actually benefitting because a country is just a collective.
Do you have a child? Do you not deduct that child in your taxes? What about a mortgage? Donations to charity? Etc. etc.
The hypocrisy is that he's publicly taken a principled stance about paying taxes whilst actually going against that in private.
> Individuals try to minimize their taxes.
This is an oversimplification. For example, I might vote for a party that would raise my own taxes, and happily pay those taxes if I thought good use was being made of them.
Unless Apple are running a break-even charity they are making money on each employee - which I would guess is due to a combination of the employees skill (gained in some way through this "free" education) and the business as a whole. In what way is there no obligation on Apple the company to pay back to society? One of the whole points of being a full time employee (as opposed to contracting under your own company) - is that the company pays taxes on your behalf to the state.
When you say "they are making money", who do you mean exactly?
A company is a collection of individuals and in the case of a public corporation, shareholders. Are not all of these participants paying their fair share of taxes?
The employees pay income tax, the shareholders should be paying taxes on dividends or capital transactions or what not.
Basically the implication is that we should tax people more when they act as part of a productive collective (corporation), which to me seems counterintuitive.
The money the company makes and the money the people make are two different streams of income and capital.
You are not taxing the people twice. You are taxing them once and the company once. A company is an entity in itself and it has a cash-flow, revenues, profits, expenditures and savings all of its own, separate to the people it employs.
It also uses up land in entirely separate way to the people it employs.
> The point about Apple hiring best graduates who got their education mostly free of charge cause of all the tax payers really shift my mind about the whole tax-avoidance thing.
Yes, that's true, but another angle is, that when the corporation profits are very high, let's say $40B yearly, then at 20% profit tax they should pay $5B. And that looks like a too high, government didn't spend nearly that much on providing stuff to Apple, per year (it's like $500K per one employee per year, if the company has 10K employes, for example).
You don't just pay taxes to get back the same amount. Taxes also include redistribution of wealth. In the US, a significant amount pays for social welfare and health insurance for the poor and elderly. That companies with healthy profit margins pay for this appears fairer than if it's just paid by small companies.
Education system is failing, protects Teachers and fails kids, and is protected by a board who doesn’t want to change because their pockets are being lined with lots of money. Doesn’t seem like redistribution to me.