Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
...oh, they are paying their property taxes? I see. So which taxes, precisely, are they not paying the Cupertino government?
Oh, there aren't any taxes, but you sort of wish someone with the authority to do so would pass a law making new taxes, but they won't, so you're mad at...Apple?
'k.
This is a weird shill piece, why bother printing it?
"Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team surrounded and escorted him off the property.
“They said ‘you cannot come in, you’re not invited’. After that I left and have not gone back,” said an exasperated Chang."
Uh huh. Yeah I bet it happened just like that.
What buffoon of a reporter prints a politician's self-serving and incredible story as plain fact? If you buy this story, I've got a pile of Trump steaks and a bottle of hot sauce from Hillary's purse to sell you. So, Barry takes a couple steps into the lobby, and the security just leaps out from behind a plant and says, "Whoever you are, you're not invited. You cannot come in." Sure. Was it the main public entrance lobby or like did he walk in behind someone else into an office building? If he wanted to talk to a higher-up, had he made an appointment? Is it that crazy that local politicians can't just walk into corporations without making an appointment and say, "I want to talk to the man in charge! Several thousand people voted for me!" Did a whole "team" really "surround" him? He makes it sound like it was a hostage situation.
During my time at Google, I had multiple people come up to me and ask me from where they could catch a guided tour of the campus. I always felt bad telling them there was none...
I cannot read that any other way except to intentionally mislead people for a greater impact on the story. I really hate this kind of journalism.
"The last time the mayor of Cupertino walked into Apple"
Yes, he is the current mayor since Dec 2015, but he was not when he "walked in to Apple."
From the article:
"“They said ‘you cannot come in, you’re not invited’. After that I left and have not gone back,” said an exasperated Chang, who’s been mayor since December 2015 and had approached the computing firm when he was serving on the city council three years ago."
He was on city council, he was not the mayor, when he went to Apple unannounced and was turned away. And I'm glad Apple turned him away -- why does he think he can show up anywhere unannounced just because of his title, be that mayor or city council member?
This is on top of this entire bullshit article, which as others have pointed out, says nothing about actual local/state taxes that Apple is not paying (because i'm sure they're probably in compliance). This article really comes down to "Mayor says life isn't fair, wants reparations."
It was a bit careless on their part. Most likely the author simply didn't know when the uninvited visit occurred didn't think to double check.
In general I don't see much benefit in imputing malicious motives to others, when far simpler explanations will suffice.
If you're looking for bad actors and intentional wrongdoers behind every mishap in the world... then that's the kind of world you'll end up living in.
"[How do] city residents benefit from [Apple's new campus]?"
Jobs: "Well, as you know, we're the largest taxpayer in Cupertino. So we'd like to continue to stay here and pay taxes. [...]. Because if we can't, then we have to go somehwere like Mountain View [and] the largest tax base will go away. This wouldn't be good for Cupertino."
Chicago doesn't have a Jobs to control it, so its endless tax raises to pay for sweetheart public union pension deals and other backroom corruption. I think the internet-friendly narrative of government being bullied by evil corporations is a fairly unrealistic. Its usually the other way around.
I find it amusing that so many have an undying love for Jobs' judgement in business, technology, etc but his political dealings give them pause because it goes against the left's idea of how the world works. Jobs didn't act like this to be difficult, he said and did these things because its one of the more effective ways to control a city government that can hurt or even destroy your business trivially.
> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government.
-- Noam Chomsky
> "so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on"
Yeah, that's never in the news.
Sometimes I feel like people have browser plugins that randomly pluck sins from the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies.
I don't like Chomsky either, but "Oh boy, a Chomsky quote" and the implication that it's somehow less valid because of its provenance is pretty much the definition of an _ad hominem_.
"oh boy, a Chomsky quote"? That implies no connotation there to you? There is no ad hominem you notice then.
> Chomsky claimed in the quoted sentence that things like huge corporate profits were not reported, your parent post says that's incorrect and they're often reported
Does that address the central point, or does it take one sentence out of context, then takes it literally without seeing the woods for the trees? Call it a straw man, call it not getting the point and splitting irrelevant hairs, same difference. Yes, all sorts of things do get reported, nope, doesn't change anything about the gist of the quote.
Here's a random comment from you to explain it better:
> your remarks are no different than a 7 year old putting down somebody for throwing like a girl.
Does that mean that's what they are literally saying, saying word by word the exact same sentence any 7 year old would say? Is the discussion about throwing? You didn't say "similar to", you said "no difference", after all. It gets worse, notice that you said "7 year old", not "roughly 7 years old". So a person who is exact 7 years old, no day, no minute, not even a second, not even tenth of a second older... but hey, it would take too long for any child to say a few words while they are still exactly 7, we could even wonder if that exact moment can even be found. So that clearly makes no sense.
Imagine getting such a response of someone either acting dumb or not getting it, and when you call it out as such, you get MORE games and a downvote. You would notice the problem quite easily, why don't you notice it here? Maybe because you don't even feel forced to seriously think about it; the difference is not that the Chomsky quote has been dealt with even just one iota more seriously or more honestly, the difference is in where the status quo lies, and what power doesn't care about or even supports. When you are on its side, one can get away with "oh boy, a Chomsky quote" and other such nonsense. Just like you could accuse someone of throwing like a girl around jocks no questions asked. Nobody will ever take you to task for your response to me. It's not like you just called anyone a racial slur, you just supported someone dismissing words with utter sophistry. Nothing to even skip a beat over, right? And the interwebs is positively littered with that, that's kind of one of the reactions Chomsky evokes. You might call him a litmus test.
And you know, I said "ad-hominem and straw man" because I didn't want to insult anyone's intelligence with this rant. It's not that I can't back up what I say in however much detail you need, I just find it unproductive. Just like I tend to collect and re-post quotes that say things I agree with; which I could say in my own words, in more words and less elegantly. Why do that, when there is a "quote for the occasion"? When people interpret a quote as saying "this is true because X says it", that's their problem, I don't operate that way.
To me, the "oh boy, a Chomsky quote" telegraphed the writer's bias against Chomsky, and the follow-on sentence showed what the writer read in your quote. Bias or dislike for a writer is not ad-hominem: it's bias and dislike. And the interpretation of the sentence was fair: a central theme of Chomsky is that the media acts to maintain the status quo, through selective reporting. And a fair criticism of Chomsky is that observation shows a fair bit of reporting on many sides of many issues.
That's quite a bit different then the comment you pulled from me (posted minutes after this one, and a pretty good indicator that I'm probably too cranky to be using the Internet this evening), since the throw-like-a-girl quote makes no sense outside of its context: you have to manufacture context for it to make sense. The Chomsky snippet you object to makes perfect sense to anyone who's read Chomsky, and even if not, the poster can hardly be accused of trying to sneak something past us when the full quote is right above it.
I like Chomsky: I think he's smart and observant and courageous. But that interpretation was what I got out of the quote as well, even though I'll bet we're pretty aligned on many issues. So if that wasn't what you meant I think you would have been better served with a response that actually said the point you were trying to make. Saying "ad hominem!" just because somebody doesn't like Chomsky doesn't serve you or your argument.
> ...shield themselves off from the theoretically 35% federal corporate tax rate
Something seems wrong here. I don't think companies are expected to pay 35% yearly on cash reserves. Am I confused, or is the article? If anyone is knowledgable about this I'd be interested to know the deal!
The US taxes companies on their worldwide income when they re-patriate that money to the US. So, if you earned $500M in France and want to bring that money back into the US, you owe US taxes on it (in addition to the French taxes already paid). If you don't bring the money back to the US, you just pay the French taxes.
People have called the ability to hold the money overseas a loophole, but given that basically no other country taxes companies on their worldwide income, it seems more that the US is the outlier.
Let's put it this way. A UK-based firm earns $1B in the US and $1B in the UK and has to pay the American tax authorities on $1B and UK tax authorities on $1B and it can then bring the profit back from the US. That seems fair. By contrast, a US-based firm earns the same amount in each country and must pay the US tax on $1B, the UK tax on $1B, and then the US tax on whatever they bring back from the UK (which has already had UK tax paid on it). This encourages companies to reinvest their profits overseas rather than bring the money back to the US where it would get taxed again.
It's partly because the US is so large and has been more isolated than most countries. Likewise, it's basically the only country that taxes individuals based on citizenship rather than residency.
The other hard thing to reason about is where the value was added. If the IP was developed in the states, technically, it has to be sold through, so profits on it are still taxed here, to the foreign branch, where only retail profits are taxed...or something like that. It gets really messy when you are also doing R&D abroad...and you can see why tax games are possible and even necessary.
Do you mean deduct, or you get a tax credit? If you mean deduct, then you pay UK taxes on $1B and then US taxes on the $800M (or whatever) that is left over.
This is where the U.S. nominal rate comes in. If it was about the same as other countries', then it would not be an impediment to repatriating profits. But at 35%, it's the highest in the world, so corps repatriating profits will indeed pay additional taxes to the U.S. government, even taking the foreign tax credits into account.
That's why corps want the corporate tax rate lowered--so that business purposes can have a bigger role in decisions about moving capital. Right now tax avoidance has a large role in those decisions, at least when it comes to the U.S.
It's also why a temporary corporate tax holiday does not really help. It lets companies bring back one big lump sum, but does not change their long-term decision making, and it is long-term decision making that determines where investment goes and where jobs are created.
Corporate share of federal tax revenue has dropped by two-thirds in 60 years — from 32% in 1952 to 10% in 2013.
General Electric, Boeing, Verizon and 23 other profitable Fortune 500 firms paid no federal income taxes from 2008 to 2012.
Our average effective tax rate is 27.1% compared with 27.7% for the other 30 OECD countries, according to CRS.
http://staging.americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-brie...
I guess i never understand why people think the solution to something having too much influence due to money is to become more dependent on their money. I can see no magic way to accomplish this without an increase in influence from that payer, and to think you can seems ... pretty pie-in-the-sky.
The real solution is to diversify where your money comes from, at pretty much any cost.
By that logic, the simplest way to get rid of the dependence is to decrease their tax to 0%...
If you don't need them, and they aren't providing anything for you, they have less influence on you.
The way you be less dependent on people is ... to be less dependent on them. Not by being more dependent and trying to set up magic firewalls or whatever.
Is it just me, or does this Mr. Chang just sound incompetent?
His citizens are saying he's making the wrong decisions. He's walking onto Apple's property and being forced out. He's asking for special taxes against Apple without saying why Apple deserves these taxes.
How about Chang makes the right decisions that pleases his citizens? Has anyone actually been to a Town Hall meeting? People don't just crumple-up the agendas because your budget sucks. They crumple-up agendas because the meeting was a waste of everybody's time.
I think this Mayor can't run a Town Hall, doesn't have much support of the citizens, and his only "big idea" is to increase taxes against Apple (and maybe some moonshot projects no one gives a care about)
A REAL Mayor would have said something along the lines of "The highway leading to Apple Headquarters is full of potholes, and I don't have the budget to fix it!". Or maybe "Teachers deserve a higher salary in this town" (or something... connected to reality, you know?). This guy just seems jealous of Apple's cash.
Although really, Apple would just change headquarters and Cupertino would be in a bit of a mess if you made an corporate-level income-tax
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is already structured this way.
There isn't an easy solution (since Apple does get taxes in other jurisdictions based on sales).
But a lot of cities are frustrated that a bank branch provides little taxes while a mcdonalds in teh same spot would bring in a ton of taxes.
Does something similar exist in CA?
In some cases, companies get sweet deals from locations to move there - Tesla is getting a whopping $1.2B from Nevada. But in Apple's case, they're paying.
Yeah. It's not a property freedom issue, it's a cost ecosystem issue. As time goes on and life changes, owning property is going to have fluid costs, and tax assessments on people who come in to develop land is one way to defray those costs from disproportionately hitting people who have lived in an area for a long time. Frankly, those people would never really plan for that kind of thing to happen, so you're avoiding a lot of nasty repercussions by taxing the person upsetting the ecosystem, rather than the members of the ecosystem itself.
2) if you do perceive them as "bringing" business, then it's only right to equally perceive them as bringing congestion, pollution, and all the other undesirable side effects of economic activity.
3) when does one ever "own" land? Property rights are enforced by the government, it's only fair that they receive compensation for that.
The compensation they extract has nothing to do with the cost of enforcing property rights, because those costs are trivial.
http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=1222
What fraction of that do you want to bet has anything to do with protecting private property, as opposed to the large revenue generating activities like parking tickets?
Is your point that they need a blank check to protect property rights? Because that's preposterous and would only demonstrate your own misunderstanding of property rights (or rights in general).
https://fee.org/search/?q=protection%20property%20rights seems pretty clear they understand the government is responsible for protecting property rights, which is a prerequisite for capitalism.
Is the irony seriously eluding you?! You're saying in order to protect our property rights, they need to further violate our property rights! For the love of god...
In one sentence you claim we never own our property, the next you say they're in charge of protecting our rights as property owners... You literally contradict yourself in one sentence...
Real estate is taxed ongoing because the Earth has finite land.
Google "Land Value Tax"
How can something that is common property, like you assert (I disagree) be claimed arbitrarily by one group of people and charged for?
It's very possible for situation where whatever property tax the city gets isn't enough to cover the actual services a company requires. Fire, EMS, police, road construction, etc. This is especially true when the workers are mostly commuters. Then the workers don't pay local taxes either.
There are positive externalities like nearby restaurants and hotels with increased business.
Its really unfair to blame apple for it since they didn't make the rules.
But I think it would be fair to levy a "worker" tax that tries to raise revenue for teh city to service the thousands of employees who spend 8-12 hours a day in Cupertino but don't pay a cent in taxes.
For example, we had a commitment for a water line to the development from the water control district. Only later after buying the land, the politics had changed and we found that yes they would bring water to the project only not in our lifetime. We would have to pay for the water lines ourselves if we wanted them. Over the years as the development grew (hundreds of residential lots) we went to the city council to request a left turn lane for the entrance. They would let us pay to put one in, but only if we planted wildflowers along the city's highways.
There seems to be constant sleazy negotiation required for any development one does. The local governments have monopoly control over the process, and they force developers to pay up.
1) Prop 13 allows commercial property owners to avoid tax reassessment when the property is transferred (they sell the shell company owning the property rather than the property itself so the property doesn't trigger a reassessment) . This means a lot of property owners are paying 80s or 90s levels of property tax rather than the amount they should be paying under current rates thus depriving cities of revenue.
2) NIMBYs. CA and especially the Bay Area is full of people that are supportive of building more infrastructure or housing as long as it isn't built where they live. They fear that any kind of infrastructure (roads, public transit) or new development (affordable housing) will bring "the wrong sort of people" into the area and affect their property prices. Cupertino and other valley cities are notorious for not building enough housing relative to the number of office space for this reason.
3). Environment impact studies. Any proposed development needs one of these and if your plan gets sucked into the detailed version then it can take years or even decades to get the project approved. If people don't approve of your development then generally they get lawyer-ed up and file a review. This will stop most developers cold as nobody wants to spent years and potentially millions dollars in court before they can break ground.
So there you have it. It generally considered to be impossible to get any large infrastructure project built in California in under 20 years. See the high speed rail project. 19 years to deliver a link between two nowhere towns (Merced and Bakersfield). China is positively rolling in the aisle with laughter.
Apparently there is also an agreement where the city refunds sales taxes back to Apple? Originally 50% and now down to 35%? Why does this even exist?
The way to get Apple to pay for infrastructure improvements is simple, don't do any near their campus and their own employees will be impacted and that will get Apple to agree to help redevelop the area.
And whatever they build they will control. I think you might be slowly giving away the city to a corporation.
In an article about property taxes paid or unpaid, it doesn't even mention property taxes. Is Apple's campus under-assessed? A little Googling shows Cupertino's tax rate as $7.96 on a thousand which would value Apple's campus at $1.16B. Is that a lot? Is that a little? What are other companies assessed at in Cupertino and surrounding cities?
The article talks about income taxes which are totally irrelevant to the situation and Woz's assertion that Apple should pay 50% income tax. The article talks about money earned offshore that Apple doesn't pay standard US income tax on, but fails to mention that pretty much every other country in the world doesn't tax foreign earned income as income earned locally (just letting it be taxed in the country it was earned). Plus, it's irrelevant to Cupertino.
This is just "you should hate on Apple. Why? Um, they're not paying taxes. What taxes aren't they paying? Um. . . the taxes."
Really, my simple Googling of Cupertino's tax rate and then trying to come up with an assessment off that isn't good journalism. But I'm just writing a comment on HN at 8am. I'm not a paid journalist - but that paid journalist hasn't researched the simplest questions possible. If Apple were replaced by hundreds of companies that added up to the same number of desks, would Cupertino get more money? If the answer is "no", then there's no story here.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employee...
The simplest Googling comes up with a much more useful article. Apple paid $25M in property tax in 2012 and that is going to grow by $32M annually with Campus 2 to over $56.5 annually. Apple is funding $66M in local public improvements and $35M on transportation demand programs. Plus, Cupertino is getting $38.1 in one-time construction fees and taxes and Apple is going to pay the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority $15.4M annually.
The caption of the image on the guardian article says the mayor wanted $100M from Apple for infrastructure - beyond the more than hundred million the VentureBeat article notes. It kind of sounds like the Mayor is incompetent, hated by voters who are trying to recall him, trying to salvage his career by running for state assembly, and trying to blame his incompetence on Apple. It seems to be more an article about how Cupertino has a terrible mayor.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple...
Here's another, much better article. It notes that Apple's original campus was 856,000 square feet and that Apple has bought (which they would pay tax on) or leased (which their landlord would pay tax on) another 2M square feet. That makes it hard to say exactly what the property should be assessed at given that we don't know what proportion of the 2M they own, but let's say half. At $500/sq ft, 1.856M square feet would come out to $928M in property value. That's pretty close to $1.16B. At the very least, it seems like Apple's taxes are in the ballpark - especially when you consider the amazing deals that companies regularly negotiate to move to locations. Tesla negotated a 100% property tax and sales tax abatement from Nevada for 10 and 20 years respectively, $12,500 for every job, 10 years of 100% business tax abatement, discounted electricity rates for 8 years, plus $120M - totaling $1.2 Billion.
Again, it sounds like an incompetent mayor that voters are trying to recall attempting to save his career.
I had to read it again to make sure I'm not making a mistake. Its unimaginable in some geographies. Evokes mixed feelings like : "cool, they can do that?" to "that's quite arrogant"
Also reminds me of a video where Steve Jobs met the council. The mayor was delighted like a teenager, showing off his iPad to Steve, asking for free Wifi : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M ( t=19:54 )
> Getting local politicians to battle Apple is hard, Chang said. He recently proposed that Apple – which is building a massive new campus its own employees nicknamed the Death Star, or more favorably, The Spaceship – should give $100m to improve city infrastructure. To move on the proposal, Chang only needed to get a single vote ‘yes’ among the three other eligible council members. He failed to get that vote.
What's his logic for this special Tax on Apple? It sounds like this guy is an anti-corporate loon, drinking too much Sanders juice or something. Sounds like the other council members are more rational.
"You’re helping create the problems, so you have to help solve the problem" - Chang
But considering that he can't even get the support of his own citizens at Town Hall meetings, nor the support of his fellow council members, methinks he's simply incompetent.
And that the problems he describes are made up in his imagination. I can't imagine it to be too difficult to come up with a budget that says "We have to pay for X Million Dollars in the next year to fix the bridges and roads... or to upgrade our water pipes, or to deploy municipal gigabit-fiber. So here's a special +5% tax on all corporations in this Town"
And if the fellow citizens and council members think the plan is worth the tax, then they'll probably agree with him. On the other hand, if citizens are balling up his agendas and throwing them out during meetings... there's clearly a problem here. And it isn't with Apple. Its with the Mayor.
I believe the city's infrastructure is struggling to cope with the city's growth. There was mentions of poor and congested roads.
> But considering that he can't even get the support of his own citizens at Town Hall meetings, nor the support of his fellow council members, methinks he's simply incompetent.
to be fair the article points out Apples image as a stumbling block to bring reform:
1) "In the case of Apple, people are so enamored with their iPhones that they can’t see the company. And year after year these companies are voted most respected, most trusted" - Matt Gardner
2) "he tried to organize a rally outside Apple. “But Apple has a pretty good image,” Chang said. “No one wanted to go"
> So here's a special +5% tax on all corporations in this Town
Chang has come up with such a proposal already, albeit it won't levy the extra tax on companies with less than a 100 employees.
> a problem here. And it isn't with Apple. Its with the Mayor.
That could be the case, though I'm leaning towards the Mayors side. This article doesn't go into much depth, and yield enough detail for me to come to a conclusion. I would do some background research but I honestly can't be bothered today. I have a feeling this isn't the last time we here of this, so i'll keep this in the back of my mind for future reference.
IE: Lets increase all corporate taxes by 3% in this city, to pay for a new road project. Here's the proposed road, etc. etc.
I mean, yeah, its hard to get approval from your citizens to build new roads. My area (on the East Coast) had to appease a ton of environmentalist types who refused to build a highway over any wetlands or swamps (ie: cheap areas), and the NIMBY guys who were being threatened with eviction.
But you propose a road (meet with engineers / architects, get some fancy drawings, write it up, build a website, etc.), you describe the costs (not just monetary, but also the houses you have to bulldoze, the "quiet" you have to disturb, meet with HOA communities to help gather support despite the costs), you raise a tax to pay for it, borrow some money with a bond and then it gets done. Its not easy, but its the freaking job of a Mayor.
---------
Why would the Mayor EVER have to explicitly reference Apple through this process? Only a complete dunce would do that, as it reeks of favoritism.
I'm reading through this entire piece, and its completely devoid of substance. The complaints are hilariously awful. I'm not sure if the Mayor is actually incompetent, or if the guardian is just awful at writing and completely focused on the wrong issues.
I mean, cripes. I've NEVER heard of a necessary road project being scuttled because of money. Its almost always the NIMBY people (to be fair, getting evicted from your family home for 50 years gotta suck because a road is being built through your plot), or environmentalists (Protect the swamp! protect the forest! Protect the grasslands!) who seem to get in the way. And NIMBY vs Environmentalists is a hell of an issue to work out.
How much of the city services do they use? How much of the city expenses is their "fair" share?
Property taxes are based on the value of (and in some cases the type of use of) local property, that's reasonable because the costs incurred by the local government to build and maintain infrastructure is related to their use of land.
His argument seems to be that because Apple makes a lot of money they should also pay more taxes, luckily for him that's the way the system works! Apple also pays corporation tax on their income.
Unfortunately for him that tax is federal and not local so he doesn't get any more than any other local government does in federal contributions.
Edit: I don't want to sound like I'm saying "the town should be grateful for these scraps and nothing more", these are benefits to the town on top of the taxes that it pays.
A huge number of towns in America are basically run by one or two corporations. Cupertino is not unique in the slightest, aside from the fact that Apple is just a larger company.
But it really doesn't matter if you "only" have a $1 Billion market cap company headquartered in your small 30,000 town, or a $600 Billion behemoth like Apple. Its all basically the same: all your taxes are basically going to come from only one source.
------------
In either cases, you can run the town independently of the corporation. True: a lot of the corporation's workers will be your citizens, but keep the issues separate and keep things fair... and you ought to get what you need done.
The German city of Wolfsburg, and the state of Niedersachsen have done it with VW.
The solution: You just buy a large amount of shares of the companies that are started in your city. Municipalities get a far larger share of the profits directly, politicians have an incentive to ensure companies are profitable, and companies can’t avoid paying for the infrastructure they use.
The German government has done it for several decades, with great success – you should take a look at their model.
In all other cases, cities investing in companies are either going to take on a VC role which I'd very much argue that they are not capable of performing well (and introduces so much room for corruption) or will be investing in mature companies and likely without the balance sheet to make a dent as far as voting power goes. I don't see how either leads to anything productive.
Don't have an American bias when people share their cultures from around the world.
There are a lot of governments, and all of our experience with the American government basically means jack diddly with respect to the German government.
With that said, I do share your concerns, but I'm not going to make claims about a government I never visited and never worked with in my life that's roughly 10 time-zones away.
The German government, for example, owns several large banking groups, which act like any normal banking group – but their dividends directly go into the tax budget. (And they have to give loans at lower interest rates to the governments).
Normal bankers, in normal environment, and they’d probably never notice it was government owned.
Most people, even mayors, make appointments when they formally visit another organization in an official capacity. They don't just walk in and expect to be seen.
Which means he'd have to have a warrant. If an Officer was "just investigating", they have to be invited or have a court order to get onto private property.
In America anyway.
Otherwise, yes, a police investigator needs permission, or a warrant, to go onto the Apple campus and ask questions or look around.
I'd be rightly ticked off if someone did that to me, and I'm not one of the worlds richest and most secretive companies.
Companies don't do that unless people turn up randomly, start making crazy claims ("take me to Steve Jobs! I'm here regarding traffic congestion!") and start acting like an ass when they don't get what they want.
Just pure speculation on my part.
Is anyone know if what if any role the Cupertino City Council played in the situation and provided a source to back this up?
Apple could be a better citizen, and contribute a lot more than money to the city around it. If the company fully subscribes to shareholder theory, they will contribute only what the law requires. But Apple seems to stand for higher things such as design excellence and human dignity.
The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration and lack of enough housing construction.
The actions taken by Cook regarding issues such as protecting privacy indicate that he stands for values beyond serving the shareholders. Those values could be developed for the community immediately outside the campus. Apple's ability to design such great things and manufacture them in vast numbers indicates that it has the ability to address very difficult problems. Those skills could be applied to the problems 25 feet away from their windows.
The people at Apple might think of Cupertino as a source of design challenges, and start by understanding the shape of the city and the people who interact with it. Take a look at the aggregate data coming in from the watch, or hang out by one of the main stroads. Try to take a walk to various useful places some time, or get three things done in a morning without a car.
All of us have the capacity to be more than a minimal tax payer. Being more starts with noticing.
The car-centric configuration is what most of the current residents want (if they wanted something else, they would choose to live somewhere else). Since they control a majority voting block in city politics, there's very little that Apple can do to change that; significant changes to the status quo will be blocked by the city residents.
We can't always walk away from what we do or where we live. Car-centric, earth-wasting behavior is ostensibly what we want, because most of us engage in it every day. So is sugar soda and processed food, lack of exercise, and any number of unhealthy things we do. So is paying huge amounts of money for a house, then fighting any new development near our neighborhood out of self interest.
It is possible for people to essentially be trapped in a situation in which rational choices are a bad ones. How might we break out of that?
Apple did.
If you're constricted to moving around the circumference of a circle, you necessarily have to go in a curved line.
Curved lines are longer than straight lines.
So the average distance between any two points is necessarily going to be longer in the Apple building than in a normal building with the same floor area.
Add to that, normal buildings have cores where the utilities are run in the center and radiate out to the edges. Running wiring, plumbing, and ductwork around a circle will involve miles of additional material that would otherwise be unnecessary.
I think maybe you and Apple have a definition of efficient that differs from the rest of the population.
It's fun and easy to point fingers, and while tax avoidance should by no means by encouraged, why is 35% of your money the direct property of a government who does superb things like conjure into existence some of the most criminal oligopolies in the medical industry?
Maybe demand Apple to build the infrastructure themselves at their own expense, and let them manage it, seems they can actually get things done.
Uncle Sam's virtues seem to end with insane taxation used to bomb other countries and slowly but surely kill its citizens through rudimentary medical care bills in the hundreds of thousands, maybe leave real work to other people, who don't spend 600 mil of taxpayer dollar on a website.
This is the municipal government complaining. Municipal governments are in charge of education, local police, and water supply... to name a few things.
The federal government barely does much at the local level. The USA is a very decentralized system.
So how about you at least complain about the right thing? If Cupertino's municipal police forces were locking people up unnecessarily or were an ineffective municipal government, that'd actually be relevant to the topic. But methinks you're just ranting about unrelated subjects.
The rest is just ridiculous. If you want an effective government, you have to take privatization out of it, not rely on it as we have.
I don't know where you live, but if it's in the US, then you're wrong: they did in fact help pay for food stamps and public housing.
Last fiscal year, Apple generated $72.5 billion in income before income taxes, and paid $19.1 billion in income taxes ($53.3b in net income). That's a 26.3% rate. That rate is higher than corporations pay in almost any other developed nation (Europe typically has the lowest corporate income tax rates for example), and that's after they go out of their way to try to avoid paying taxes. That $19 billion in taxes pays for a lot of welfare state benefits.