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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

> I find it fascinating that a tax plan proposed by a President reviled throughout the Valley is the one thing that finally convinced Apple to repatriate much of its overseas cash and invest it here in the US.

Why is that fascinating? It's the tax holiday the tech megacorps have been asking for since the last one in 2004.

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And yet nobody gave it to them until now, which resulted in trillions of dollars that should have been benefitting the US economy sitting unused in places like Ireland.

Let's say I thought I was paying too much in taxes, and now I'll pay less in taxes next year due to this tax cut. No one gave me that tax cut until now!

Nothing about that is "fascinating". You're trying to make a narrative out of "hey, we want this." "OK, here it is."

You'd have more of a point if you were trying to say that all the doomsayers were wrong about the downsides of a tax holiday and here's the proof, but it's a bit early for that.

You do know that the money isn't literally sitting overseas right? It is invested (Apple would be the largest bond fund in the world [1] if they accepted outside money). So they'll sell the investments, pay a little tax and then probably do a massive buy back of their shares and a special dividend. A little switching around on paper, but certainly not a stimulus of any sort.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-04/apple-buy...

Of course there is no Apple cash hoard, it's all invested. The difference is it being invested in foreign countries, or invested in America.

That's not the difference at all, it is invested in corporate debt (much of it from US companies) and giant amounts of US Treasuries. Even the people that manage it do so from the US.

The difference is purely in accounting, they keep that money on a different line of their balance sheet and are unable to use it for domestic expenses without paying tax on it.

Most of the money isn't going to move at all after they repatriate it (they'll actually sell Treasuries to pay... the Treasury!). No part of "bringing back" the money will result in more money being invested in the US--it's already invested here!

If it will be used for a "domestic expense" then it is being spent into the American economy.

Except those trillions of dollars were already benefiting the US economy by acting as collateral for huge loans and investments taken out by Apple stateside. Even with the deemed repatriation the money will most likely still sit in Irish bank accounts, and in certain cases escrow and PE funds, as it makes no sense to spend the time and effort to wire the money over to a US bank since taxes were already paid on it and renegotiating the banking deals alone would probably be more money than it's worth.

In general, from reading a lot of your comments, you seem to act like an authority on this issue when most of your statements sound like a freshman who just finished his macro midterm. If you actually read the lobbying documents and testimony from many corporations, this deemed repatriation wasn't at the top of their lists, and in many cases was completely unwanted. Even further, the republicans actually ended up with a much higher tax rate than what was originally agreed, 15/8 vs 10/7. Of course, this was offset by long term corporate tax decreases but many large multinationals vigorously advocated for no repatriation and just a tax change, or at the least a very soft repatriation holiday and absolutely no deemed repatriation.

Fortunately, due to things like "balanced budgets" and "deficits", the Republican caucus was quite literally forced to enact a "deemed repatriation" on offshore funds to make the corporate tax changes viable in the least. "Deemed" as in mandatory, which you so incorrectly refuted above in a different comment, because again, without it the corporate tax changes would have made the government unable to follow up on current monetary obligations. Some would, justifiably, call such a lenient deemed repatriation analogous to a soft holiday, but the overall point is that corporations actually took a small loss on this facet of the tax bill to gain a huge win in other parts.

The whole fight over repatriation was mostly a sleight of hand trick to captivate the public while making changes that actually matter to the more permanent corporate tax code. After all, Apple even stated a couple years ago they were using the money sitting in Ireland to help finance their upcoming (now finished) campus. Where the money is matters very little compared to where it's spent since dollars are fungible.

Saving this burn for later

Yeah, I wasn't aware that personal attacks were allowed on HN. And it's not just me, a quick review of his comments shows that virtually every one of them involves calling people stupid, naive, liars, etc. This guy should be banned from HN.

One of the better parts of this bill was the switch to a territorial taxation system so we can stop playing chicken with tax holidays. This is not merely a holiday, but is a permanent policy change.

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