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El Reg reports
Steve Wozniak has spoken out against Apple's tax affairs, saying all companies ought to pay 50 per cent in taxes.
Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live he said: "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 per cent of anything I make in taxes and I believe that's part of life and you should do it."
Asked if Apple should pay that amount, he replied: "Every company in the world should."
According to Woz, money was never a factor when he started the biz with Steve Jobs 40 years ago. He added: "Steve Jobs started Apple Computers for money, that was his big thing and that was extremely important and critical and good."
Europe is currently scrutinising Ireland's tax arrangements with Apple over an alleged sweetheart deal with the company. Some have speculated the probe could lead to Apple paying $8bn in back taxes, even though the case is against the Irish government.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 26 2016, @12:50PM
which is subject to a LOT more manipulation
Possibly you're the only comment actually replying to Woz. Everyone else is sloganeering (well, mostly). Some of the sloganeering is actually pretty good.
I wouldn't even go as far as "manipulation" because corporate finance structure depends on the underlying business.
No one wants to pay taxes, naturally, so making paper profits illegal will result in paper products disappearing. This is easy to do on the spreadsheet and hard to do in real life. That can only have negative effects on economic growth because the "best" corporate financial structure is rarely having zero paper products.
So all the money will go into ... capex. OK hurray we just make our bubble economy more bubbly. We'll overbuild until it all crashes, after all taxes are a 100% loss to the corporation but digging holes and filling them in might be only a 99.999% loss to the corporation if you sell it as an exercise routine DVD or some idiocy like that. Who wins? Won't be "us".
So all the money will go into ... stock operations. Think Alibaba as a chunk of yahoo. OK hurray no one benefits from commissioned salespeople brokers. Whats the endgame after all ownership is concentrated into a handful of companies? Was that what you thought you were asking for when you asked for high taxes on paper profits?
We can bury the money in the balance sheet. Tada! No dividends, never. No profits to be taxed. The elite rich who own all the stock will now see their stock grow faster than ever. I mean, you knew high corporate tax rate would increase income inequality and you intentionally wanted that, right? It seems pretty obvious.
What happens when a natural annual business cycle does NOT line up with the annual tax cycle? OK I see your entire farm harvest is pure profit, at least on our tax calendar you have no expenses this quarter all piles of revenue, we'll take half of that in taxes and waste it all, leaving you with not enough to plant next season. Its a simple parasitical ecological simulation. At peak health a very well fed animal can possibly withstand a rare and short term tapeworm infestation. But why would the tapeworm infestation "naturally" line up with being well fed? What if it happens in the dead of winter? Well I guess the animal dies "oh well" at least the tapeworm had a nice last dinner. This also applies to cycles longer than annual, obviously. Unless the parasitical tax cycle lines up with the business cycle, the business will be killed. Do any business cycles line up with the existing tax cycle other than big screen TV sales at walmart? Is it good to centrally control all business cycles via taxation?
The fundamental problem is "we" are used to an economic system where humans are paid the same amount of pure profit 52 or 26 times, then settle up an annual record, but corporations don't and usually can't operate on that same schedule (so every 26 entries in accounts recieveable for a corporation they should balance and pay their tax records, wtf? How does that scale?).
Even if it made sense for a food store or some business anyway, it simply wouldn't work for the energy sector, or semiconductor plants, or the FIRE sector, or numerous other interesting businesses we'd like to keep around.
See the problem isn't the parasitical nature of taxation, its that the parasitical nature means avoidance, and avoidance means all kinds of useful business can't be done anymore or the costs are staggering.
In the end .gov taxes everything multiple times, may as well just VAT it on the consumption side and property tax it on the wealth side and be done with it. The income tax concept is just a dumb idea that does little but make accountants a pile of money.