Bravo Microsoft!
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Bob_Robertson Dec 11, 2005 10:24 AM EDT |
If I had the lawyers to elude (not evade, that would be illegal) taxes too, I would. Is anyone going to say they wouldn't do the same thing, especially with that kind of money at stake? |
| dinotrac Dec 11, 2005 10:53 AM EDT |
Bob... Sigh. Forced to agree. This is not so much a "Microsoft" story as it is a fact of multinational corporate life. |
| AnonymousCoward Dec 11, 2005 2:35 PM EDT |
Not everybody does. The one which springs to mind is the band Abba, who preferred to pay the ninety percent income taxes levied on their stupendous income by Sweden than play tax games and "get away" with something like 10-20%. I also seem to remember riots in the USA when income tax rates first dared to cross the unprecendented threshold of six percent. |
| dinotrac Dec 11, 2005 2:55 PM EDT |
Kudos to ABBA, but they were not a publicly-held multinational corporation. I don't think you remember any tax riots in the USA. The last tax riot aimed at a federal (won't vouch for state and local) tax that I can think of was the Whiskey Rebellion, back near the end of the 18th century. I'm sure you were quite young at the time. |
| gryphen Dec 12, 2005 3:17 AM EDT |
Just another instance of Uncle Bill evading something. Although I will say that maybe if the company would come out and say that by paying a discounted tax rate they are instead spending that money on a better operating system, maybe they wouldn't be taking so much heat. But then we all know that a computer virus has a better chance on a Linux operating system. lol =) |
| Bob_Robertson Dec 14, 2005 8:55 AM EDT |
ABBA were individuals, making an individual choice. As Dino points out, a publicly owned company has a duty to _maximize shareholder value_. One of the aspects of this is minimizing costs, and taxes are a cost. If Microsoft did NOT do perfectly legal things like this, they could be sued by their stockholders. No kidding. Actually, the last major tax revolt in the US was in 1861. It was a very big fight, but in the end the tax collectors won. For peaceful revolts, there's California and "prop 13", as well as the "revolution" of 1994 in which quite a lot of people thought they were voting for lower taxes and less government spending. Hahahaha, fooled them! |
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