Quote:Here’s what’s actually going on. As part of its transition to a new system of International taxation, the Republican tax bill included a big, one-timed levy on all the profits U.S. corporations have been hoarding abroad for years. (This is known as a deemed repatriation.) Apple has been sitting on a giant overseas money hoard worth $252 billion. Today, we learned it would pay $38 billion to the IRS as the cost of bringing that cash home.
And what else did we learn? Not a ton. The press release predicts that between its “current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers—an estimated $55 billion for 2018—Apple’s direct contribution to the US economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years.” In other words, Apple will keep buying stuff from other U.S. companies. This is not a patriotic act of charity. Apple is literally saying it will continue business as usual. That alone accounts for $275 billion of its $350 billion forecast.
The 20,000 jobs are nice. (Apple says it currently employs 84,000 U.S.) But there’s no evidence, contra Fox’s talking heads, that they’re coming “back to America” from anywhere. Meanwhile, it’s hard to tell if the $30 billion the company plans to spend would actually be a meaningful increase in its domestic U.S. investment. According to its annual reports, Apple has devoted $56.9 billion to capital expenditures worldwide over the past five years. Presumably, a good chunk of that was spent stateside, building out its retail network and its gleaming new Cupertino campus, for instance. But it’s hard to know how much. “The company has not given guidance in the past regarding where and how capital spending was allocated. This is the first I heard of a specific allocation,” Asymco analyst Horace Dediu told me in an email. So, maybe Apple really is “accelerating” it’s U.S. investment. Maybe it’s not. There’s no actual way to tell based on the information it’s shared publicly.
That brings us to the separate question of whether this spending has anything at all to do with Trump’s tax bill. The answer is almost surely not. Apple has long paid an extremely low tax rate, and it is only really bringing its overseas profits “home” on paper. In reality, the company has always been able to access that money by borrowing against it at dirt cheap rates, which it’s previously done to fund dividends and buybacks for its investors. The specific investments Apple announced today, such as the more than $10 billion it plans to spend on new data centers to support its growing cloud-based businesses like Apple Music, are things it likely would have needed to do not matter what happened in Washington.
https://slate.com/business/2018/01/no-ap...-bill.html
Quote:The reality: With the exception of some computers made in the U.S. and Ireland, nearly all of Apple's hardware products are made by outsourcing partners in Asia. Apple reportedly asked its Chinese suppliers what it would take to relocate production of the iPhone stateside, but cost is the biggest barrier. Apple has also long said that it has better access to skilled workers in China. And building the iPhone here would lead to higher prices for consumers.
De ja vu: Trump isn't the first president to ask Apple to bring jobs back to American soil. When President Obama asked how it could be done back in 2010, Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs said bluntly, "Those jobs aren't coming back."
https://www.axios.com/the-reality-on-tru...a4df7.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
