
Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes - Libertatea
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/05/apple-taxes-cupertino-mayor-infrastructure-plan
======
Lazare
I can't believe Apple is wilfully not paying property taxes on their
headquarters! That's quite illegal, and I'm sure...

...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.

~~~
slantaclaus
They're called impact fees, and the dumb shmuck should have created laws to
levy them beforehand

~~~
gumby
He tried and failed, which makes his position even more absurd, regardless of
what you think of the merits of his case.

~~~
slantaclaus
If I remember correctly, that was a special assessment tax for the particular
development in question which Jobs ripped to shreds by threatening to move
Apple's operations elsewhere in the valley. What they would have had to have
done was to create a catch-all impact fee law to apply to all developments
based on the number of new traffic they would create. This would probably be
bad for business though.

------
lewis500
This reporter is credulous, because the Guardian is just awful.

"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.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Did you also notice that the way the Guardian wrote that paragraph makes it
sound like Apple turned away the mayor, when in fact he was not the mayor at
the time he went to Apple unannounced.

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."

~~~
kafkaesq
_I cannot read that any other way except to intentionally mislead people for a
greater impact on the story._

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.

~~~
wutbrodo
This would be a reasonable approach if we weren't talking about a piece of
published journalism. That makes it both more unlikely that it was accidental
(due to a higher bar of fact-checking), and more blameworthy even if it was
due to negligence.

~~~
kafkaesq
What can I say?

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.

------
Eduard
Question towards Steve Jobs on a Cupertino City Council Meeting in 2011:

"[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."

[https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s](https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Can you blame him? There's nothing sleazier than municipal governments, at
least once they reach a certain size. They all see the business class as a
gravy train to ride instead of finding ways to do a better job with the
already large budgets they have.

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.

~~~
PavlovsCat
While we're talking generalities, here's something more serious.

> 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

~~~
strictnein
Oh boy... a Chomsky quote.

> "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.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Oh, an ad-hominem and a straw man, and of course total avoidance of the core
point. What a surprise.

~~~
rfrey
What? There's no ad-hominem there. And what straw man? 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. Maybe he's
right, maybe you're right, but there's no straw man.

Sometimes I feel like people have browser plugins that randomly pluck sins
from the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> What? There's no ad-hominem there

"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.

~~~
rfrey
OK, well in my opinion if your complaint was that the original poster was
misinterpreting or misrepresenting Chomsky, I think it would have been more
helpful to say that, and maybe to reiterate the central point that you
(through the Chomsky quote) were trying to convey.

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.

------
yalogin
This is such a crappy hit job on Apple. The mayor green lighted a bunch of
projects in Cupertino and the people hated it. The congestion is not happening
because of Apple but because of the new home developments that are approved.
He wants to protect himself by getting free money from Apple to make his
people happy with some infrastructure construction. Apple is not obligated to
give the guy free money.

------
apeace
> Apple pays a 2.3% effective tax rate on its $181bn in cash held offshore...

> ...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!

~~~
mdasen
Basically all countries tax companies on income earned in that country. So, if
you're a UK company and you earn $1B in the UK and $500M in France, you pay
tax on $1B to the UK government and tax on $500M to the French government.

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.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
This isn't entirely accurate. First, You can deduct foreign taxes paid, so $1B
earned in the UK could would come back only in paying the difference of higher
US and UK taxes. But tax systems in different countries are different,
deductions are different, as are fees and such....it leads to a huge mess.

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.

~~~
snowwrestler
Corporations get a tax credit on taxes paid to foreign countries.

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.

~~~
Retric
The 'before deductions' part makes that 35% rate meaningless. A 10% tax on 10
billion is > than a 35% tax on 2 billion.

 _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...](http://staging.americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-
booklet/fact-sheet-corporate-tax-rates/)

[http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41743.pdf](http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41743.pdf)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The problem is, for income earned abroad, meaning of the deduction that lower
the rate domestically don't apply as easily, so you wind up actually paying
somewhere near 35%. "Hey here is an incentive to do stuff in the states"
doesn't apply when you aren't doing stuff in the states.

------
DannyBee
So, uh, the city is already highly dependent on one payer, and the solution
proposed is to _increase the proportion that payer pays_?

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.

~~~
shwouchk
(I'm not addressing the article at all, just your logic):

By that logic, the simplest way to get rid of the dependence is to decrease
their tax to 0%...

~~~
DannyBee
Yes, or increase the amount you get from others.

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.

------
dragontamer
> At a recent Cupertino city council meeting, some residents protested about a
> lack of funding for public projects, Chang said – even crumpling up meeting
> agendas and throwing them. “They ball up the paper and throw it, and they
> say ‘You’re making all the wrong decisions’,” Chang said. “In the meantime
> Apple is not willing to pay a dime. They’re making profit, and they should
> share the responsibility for our city, but they won’t. They abuse us.”

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.

~~~
adventured
If Apple is meant to pay a new tax based on their net income, then every
business that operates in Cupertino should obviously pay the same tax. Let's
see how that goes over.

~~~
dragontamer
Exactly.

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

~~~
auntienomen
They wouldn't have to physically move. Only legally. It'd be easy enough for
them to arrange so that the corporate entity in Cupertino is a subsidiary
which only ever makes a loss. No profits, no tax for Chang.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is already structured this way.

------
martinald
In the UK we have the concept of "Section 106" payments which allow a
development through planning by the developer paying the local government some
amount of money to redress the cost of dealing with congestion, public relam,
affordable housing, etc. For large skyscraper developments in London, this can
be many many millions of pounds.

Does something similar exist in CA?

~~~
djschnei
Wow... outstanding haha. So in bringing more business to an area, they need to
pay twice? At what point do people actually own the land they own?

~~~
goldbrick
1) the developer doesn't "bring" business to the area, they are supported by
their clients and are responding to economic incentives, same as anyone else.

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.

~~~
jessriedel
> 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.

~~~
goldbrick
Not trivial at all, just mostly invisible and most of us who've only known
modern western societies never give it a second thought.

~~~
jessriedel
Try again. Law enforcement was just 9% of the Cupertino municipal budget in
2015.

[http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=1222](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?

~~~
goldbrick
Like I said, completely invisible to you.

------
guelo
Regardless of the politics, Apple and Google and all the other Peninsula
companies should be willing to help fund public transit because it is directly
affecting their ability to recruit employees.

~~~
tamana
They are. The people who control the munis don't want to bother building
transit.

------
Shivetya
So Apple is already contributing nearly twenty percent of the city's budget? I
think the real problem is not enough diversification.

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.

~~~
demarq
> 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.

~~~
dragontamer
That'd only happen if you ceded zoning regulations over to Apple though.

------
rdlecler1
You might argue that the mayor is abusing us because of the cities housing
restrictions.

~~~
slantaclaus
PREACH

------
mdasen
Absolutely terrible article.

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...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-
campus-2-7k-employees-32m-in-property-tax-9k-construction-jobs-66m-in-public-
improvements/)

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...](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple-
company-town-20130929)

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.

~~~
afsina
"The Guardian" has a left leaning bias. So I am not surprised with the way of
reporting.

~~~
irish_lad
As well as that notorious bias, they have an axe to grind with Silicon Valley
in general. Still it plays to their masses, just have a look at the comments.

------
sourcd
> Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team
> surrounded and escorted him off the property.

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M)
( t=19:54 )

~~~
pc86
Why couldn't they? It's private property.

~~~
sourcd
As I said, in some countries, you can't treat an on duty public/government
"servant" like that.

~~~
justin66
If he'd been a police officer investigating a crime, or a fire marshall, that
wouldn't fly. Doing it to the mayor is just rude.

~~~
dragontamer
> If he'd been a police officer investigating a crime,

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.

~~~
justin66
It's not quite that simple. If the police officer has probable cause to
believe a crime is in progress, or the fire marshal believes a dangerous code
violation might exist, woe to the dumbass who tries to escort them off the
property.

Otherwise, yes, a police investigator needs permission, or a warrant, to go
onto the Apple campus and ask questions or look around.

------
GBond
Another example of "High Tech is the new Banking"... in the bad public
perception sense.

------
discardorama
What's forgotten in this discussion are the property taxes in Cupertino. The
property values in Cupertino are among the highest in the Bay Area, and with
that comes more property taxes. I doubt Cupertino would be this desirable were
it not for Apple (and the school district). So once again Apple, albeit
indirectly, helps pad city coffers.

~~~
kumarm
Most residents of Cupertino pay very little property tax due to prop 13. Some
residents pay 3000$ for the same house when their neighbors pay 18000$.

~~~
discardorama
"Most" requires some hard data; and whether the fraction is higher or lower
than the neighboring areas. Prop 13 is California-wide, so it's not specific
to Cupertino.

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nxzero
Unable to find a source, but I thought Cupertino City Council approved this;
if true, the Mayor blaming Apple for the City Council's actions seems a bit
twisted.

Is anyone know if what if any role the Cupertino City Council played in the
situation and provided a source to back this up?

------
based2
[http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone-
flyover-m...](http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone-flyover-may/)

------
jamespitts
Perfect article while the Life and Death of Cities is in mind.

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.

~~~
stephencanon
> 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 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.

~~~
jamespitts
What is "want"? And why does it have to be so immovable?

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?

------
imgabe
Slightly off topic, but is that really the design for Apple's new
headquarters, a giant ring? So if you want to get from a place on one side to
the other, you have to walk halfway around the circle or cut through the giant
park in the middle? That seems horribly inefficient.

~~~
Bud
You might need to think more about what "efficient" actually means.

Apple did.

~~~
imgabe
If you can move in a 2 dimensional plane, such as inside a regular building,
you can go in a straight line between any two points.

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.

------
Loque
It's not just apple, it is every company that dodges taxes. Making an example
of apple is not fair - everyone should pay their taxes... who knows how the
systems we have in place would actually work if people used it the way it is
designed (instead of finding loopholes for their own benefit).

~~~
icebraining
Which taxes is Apple dodging? I'm not sure you read the article carefully. The
mayor wanted to pass a new tax, but the other council members voted his
proposal down.

~~~
Loque
Ah, thanks - it seems I was talking about something else;
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple-
eur...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple-european-
commission-ruling-back-taxes-ireland)

~~~
icebraining
That's not Apple dodging taxes either; they were just caught in the crossfire
of the tax war that's been happening in the EU. Ireland, the Netherlands, etc
try to lure companies by competing on tax rates, which the rest of the EU
doesn't like, so as in any cartel, they forbid member states from dropping
them too low. Since Ireland's was found to be in infringement, the companies
have to pay the difference.

------
alfl23
Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed
organisation like the US government when most of it goes to paying interest to
the lovely central banks folks and the public has almost 0 transparency over
its expenditure? The perfect portrayal of profound inefficiency and over-
bloated corporate structure.

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.

~~~
krisdol
Apple has yet to provide me with food stamps or public housing, both of which
saved me when I was a refugee. I can check with my spouse but I'm pretty sure
the public hospital she works at was not an apple product.

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.

~~~
adventured
Apple paid $46 billion in just income taxes over the last three fiscal years.
The majority of that was likely in the US market, where they're more heavily
taxed and have a very large market share.

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.

~~~
NLips
The parent's point is precisely that: The welfare is paid by the government,
with money that it takes in taxes from e.g. corporations.

