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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

They would probably return that money to shareholders which they don't feel they can do at the moment because it is mostly held outside the US.

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And returning that money to shareholders (dividends) would incur income tax to the recipient, thus the tax-man gets his due. A much better outcome than just holding cash overseas

If they return money to shareholders via buybacks, there is no tax. Only when the shareholder sells will potential capital gains be taxed.

Someone has to sell shares for Apple to buy them. Those sellers pay tax.

If they realise capital gains and they live in the US. E.g. Belgian stockholders of Apple don't pay any taxes (not in Belgium, not in the US) on capital gains.

So now we'll just have private offshore holdings instead of business holdings?

They probably would pay withholding taxes if their assets are US-domiciled. I.e. of they bought US-listed shares from a US exchange.

No. Only dividends are subject to withholding taxes (and are taxed twice, once in the US at 15%, the remainder taxed at 27%). It's a crazy system.

Before you think of moving to Belgium: US citizens can't escape the IRS, no matter where they live, and so do pay capital gains tax.

There's always more R&D. Google could always build a dozen more moonshots. Apple could spend more too. AI, batteries, chips, VR/AR, etc. The future is waiting for someone to invent it.

They are not constrained by money to do more R&D (or they would already be doing it).

No one said they were constrained by money for current products. You can always take on more projects and spend more money.

Apple, for example, is always extremely focused. Their products fit on one table.

Google's moonshots could get very expensive, especially if they venture farther into healthcare.

$20 billion R&D budgets can't be too hard to achieve. http://fortune.com/2014/11/17/top-10-research-development/

This would have the unintended/intended consequence of increasing the value of the dollar vs currencies around the world. I think to an extent US administrations see the corporate tax rate and specifically the ability to apply lower rates for repatriated foreign profits as a policy tool for manipulating the strength of the dollar should they need too.

Your argument on why Google et al. do not reinvest that money is because it is money they already didn't reinvest where they made it?

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