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A comment on The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy – It Didn’t Go Well. Parent comment

Re:The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy – It Didn’t Go ... by baddox on Friday April 05, 2019 @03:21PM (#19586080)
I don't think the analogy applies. It is pretty easy for reasonable people to agree that that fuel line loophole is not in the spirit of the rules, since we know that the point of the rule is to ensure each racer has the same amount of fuel. In that case, of course, patching the loophole is trivial: just limit the total amount of fuel that can be stored in the car.

The difference with taxes is that there isn't some well-agreed upon precise amount or percentage of money that companies are supposed to pay. The rules are very complicated, even for companies that most people wouldn't consider to be "searching for loopholes."

In other words, it may be easy to get a lot of people to agree that Apple should be paying more taxes to the US, but how will they agree on an exact amount?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy – It Didn’t Go ... by ip26 on Friday April 05, 2019 @04:09PM (#19586520)
We don't need to know what the right number is exactly to know that $1 is not a good faith estimate of the value of IP licensed from Apple USA to Apple France (for a somewhat hypothetical example). As far as I understand many of the games hinge on tricks like that.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy – It Didn’t Go ... by baddox on Saturday April 06, 2019 @01:08AM (#19589361)
But my point remains. Does anyone expect Apple to just voluntarily contribute more so that fewer people are upset about their so-called loopholes? That just doesn’t make much sense. They could voluntarily contribute 80% of their profits and there would still be complaints from people who think that the correct ethical amount of taxation is more than that.
[ Parent | on HN ]