at the nationalmemo.com today. you can draw that direct connection, the direct connection with complicated and sometimes not very complicated tax strategies, usually involving ireland, that keep a company s tax billow and my tax bill where it stands now? here is the simple way to think about it. imagine if instead of having your taxes taken out of your check before you got it, you can keep that money and pay the government 30 years from now. if you invested that money at 3%, it would be 2.5 times as large in the future and the taxes would be the same. it is a zero interest loan. you would actually make money off the tax system and that s what apple and other big companies do. the tax system is a profit center and indeed enron called its tax department a profit center. jean, i have to say when i talk about taxes and budgets, jean is the one. we just chat about taxes and budgets all the time. apple s complex tax strategies really draw it is an example of what s wrong with the tax
it is official. tumbler is becoming part of yahoo!. now what. yahoo! bought the website for $1.1 billion this week but it may be worth even more. marissa mayer promised users the company won t screw this up. users are skeptical. laurie siegel sat down with david carp this week and it is so interesting this kid didn t even go didn t even finish high school and now he is negotiating with marissa mayer, probably one of the most famous female tech executives for his company. what was her role in all of this? marissa mayer has for some reason this charge in the tech industry. you see, all of these young entrepreneurs going to yahoo! now and yahoo! wasn t able to get a lot of the younger start-ups to get involved. it wasn t cool to be acquired by yahoo!. i will say this. david carp really defines cool. he is a new york-based
that, it is not easy starting a company 14, 15, 16 years old. he has had to learn a lot. the highs have been very high and entrepreneurship, the lows are very low. absolutely. i think it is so interesting that this guy, you know, $250 million maybe high school drop out, clearly one of the tech brains. we have been hearing about tumbler users jumping ship all week. what is the status of what the users are saying about this acquisition? sorry. partnership. exactly. look, people are worried. the tumbler users, there is a certain user base. they have fiercely independent people pouring their hearts out on blogs and a lot of people went to word press, the biggest competitor and i had the opportunity to sit down with the founder of word press, and they re looking at the tenth anniversary. believe it or not, they have been around for ten years and he said, look, people jump ship any time this kind of thing happens. we ll see if it sticks. what he said that was very interesting is the didn
hundreds, thousands of loopholes for companies and companies don t pay those top tax rates including apple. this week a senate committee grilled apple ceo tim cook on the company s tax practices. the committee wrote a scathing report that found apple uses subsidiaries in ireland to avoid paying taxes, all legal because of all of these books behind me. senator john co-authored the report. america s tax system is broken and uncompetitive and i have long supported efforts to modernize it. however, i will not allow that position to be used as an excuse to turn a blind eye to the highly questionable tax strategies used by apple. apple ceo tim cook defended his company. we pay all of the taxes we owe every single dollar. we not only comply with the laws, but we comply with the spirit of the law.
we don t depend on tax gimmicks. we don t move intellectual property offshore and use it to sell our products back to the united states to avoid taxes. apple isn t doing anything illegal. it is simply doing what every u.s. company does, take advantage of all of these loopholes that congress itself created. it is a point senator rand paul made during one of the hearings more fire breathing moments. i frankly think the committee should apologize to apple. i think the congress should be on trial here for creating a bizarre and byzantine tax code that runs into the tens of thousands of pages for creating a tax code that simply doesn t compete with the rest of the world. so this is that tax code, and paul went on to say that congress doesn t need to be having a hearing t needs to be looking in a mirror. it needs a mirror because it is time for congress to take a good look at itself before castigating companies for legally navigating the system. david johnson is a columnist and