Half of the joke was probably the Cupertino city council being jealous of Google providing free wifi for Mountain View.
Jobs has a good point about "paying taxes." In the last few years, a lot of people in the Bay Area outside tech are saying things like "why doesn't tech do more to build more housing." They pay taxes, and tech workers living in the cities are paying income and property taxes. The communities should be asking themselves why they, themselves, aren't building more housing. What did they think these added tax dollars should be going it?
When the planning commission of a city likens housing advocacy to "an onslaught of anarchists and YIMBY Neoliberal fascists", rational process has pretty much broken down.
Places like Japan have negative birthrates and restrictive immigration policies.
NIMBYism is a reaction to a sudden influx of newcomers to an area. As such, hot remote work spots like Bend, OR are very likely experiencing a similar NIMBYist mindset.
Tokyo has continuous growth, and almost no NIMBYism. While Japan as a whole has negative birthrates and restrictive immigration policies, Tokyo has neither.
The comment you’re responding to is a real, important difference between Japan’s response to growth (in the Tokyo area) and other cities and regions’ responses to growth. Handwaving it doesn’t help.
I'm curious what you think is the difference between Japan's response to growth versus other places. Given the fact that Japan zones on a federal vs local level, this already reduces the potential of NIMBYists blocking new development. However this does not mean that NIMBYism does not exist there.
"We pay our taxes" sounds a bit disingenuous from a company that is famous for aggressively offshoring its profits to avoid paying US and California taxes, the latter of which would directly contribute to local housing programs.
Normally, I'd say that actually cheats the federal government out of tax revenue (for now), but Apple actually is incorporated in California, not Delaware, and California has various corporate taxes.
That said, it doesn't make sense for the global profits of a company like Apple to get taxed in California or Cupertino. The accounting isn't necessarily easy, but it makes more sense to tax where was money was made (which is murky and complicated) than to funnel it all to the HQ; Apple is more than just a spaceship in one city.
This isn't to say Apple isn't doing things to avoid paying taxes, either. My point is that using corporate taxes of a company with global sales to solve local issues doesn't make sense.
Apple's marketing is that the money is made in California. Designed by Apple in California has long appeared as a feel good on their products that are assembled overseas.
I would point you to all that cash sitting offshore that they can't repatriate back to the US, and can't seem to find productive use for in the countries where it sits. That is the direct result of tax planning. I haven't been keeping up with the cases, but I know Amazon won, and Coca-cola just lost, not sure where Apple's cases are in tax court. Hopefully they aren't an EY audit/tax client.
Apple's effective worldwide tax rate is ~25%, which is actually slightly higher than other US multinationals. That is also not counting taxes on income/capital gains paid by California employees, which are obviously pretty sizable.
"Apple’s effective U.S. federal income tax rate was just 7.3% in 2011. Apple claimed its tax rate in 2011 was 24.2%, one-third less than the official tax rate of 35%. But the Senate subcommittee found its rate was no more than 20.1%, allowing "Apple to claim credit for $3 billion of deferred taxes on overseas income that are not owed until the profits are brought back to the United States. Since Apple has said that is not likely to happen, its effective tax rate in 2011 was just 7.3% – $2.5 billion in taxes actually paid against $34.2 billion of income before taxes. [Exhibit 1a, pp. 38-39]"[0]
Sure it does -- Apple's effective worldwide tax rate is ~25%. Like every US multinational, Apple structure themselves to optimize their tax burden, but it's not like they "have a history of not paying taxes".
Thank you for posting. This is exactly what I thought about. Anyone other than Steve probably would have said something like “that’s something we can look into and explore.” Leave it to Steve to be like “nah. We pay our taxes. That’s good.”
Steve: I'm a simpleton I've always had this view that we pay taxes and the city should do
those things. That's why we pay taxes. Now if we can get out of paying taxes I'll be glad to put up Wi-Fi.
> Steve: I'm a simpleton I've always had this view that we pay taxes and the city should do those things. That's why we pay taxes. Now if we can get out of paying taxes I'll be glad to put up Wi-Fi.
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It was probably more "even a broken clock is right twice a day" than a principled stand. He was notoriously cheap. He avoided paying child support for a long time, short-changed Wozniak, etc. [1]
After working there for a bit the most amazing story I heard is that he would lease a new car every six months so that he wouldnt need to get a plate put on it so he could park in the handicap spot without getting ticketed.
1) How does not having a plate let you park in the handicapped space? The regulation is probably written such that you are required to have the handicapped plate or placard, and displaying no plate would be probable cause here.
2) Why not just have Apple reserve a parking space for the CEO or Steve Jobs outright? There's no regulations against reserving parking spaces in such a manner that I'm aware of.
3) Why is there so much worship in the tech industry of complete assholes like this?
I thought the handicapped spot story and the every-six-months-new-car-for-no-plates story were separate. Steve didn't want a license plate on his car because he thought it messed up the aesthetics. He was also a jerk and parked in the handicapped spot because he could.
They’ve always been separate stories to me too and I’ve heard the same “aesthetics” point a bunch too (which doesn’t make it “true”, but sounds plausible anyway).
I was always under the impression this was less about being cheap, but more about being really idiosyncratic about the way license plates look on cars.
Leasing a new car every 6 months is not cheap. It literally costs 6x as much as leasing the exact same car every 3 years (the industry norm).
I’m sure you’re joking, but I think Jobs was referring to property taxes. I’m not sure how much other tax they could contribute to a local town (sales tax is probably much less than the property tax).
I recognize the clever point. Investigations in cases such as these will gather evidence to bring to a grand jury, which will issue indictment. So investigation would either proceed to either the grand jury trial, or be abandoned due to lack of evidence. In the case of jokes, it would be the latter, and experienced offices would recognize this early, perhaps before beginning, and focus on other cases.
I'm not sure why people are treating this like it's bribery.
Free wifi would be something that inures to the benefit of the city / jurisdiction, not primarily to the individual decisionmakers or their department. It may not be something legitimate that they can make planning approval dependent upon, but an elected body trying to negotiate something that sweetens the deal for their electorate is completely legitimate.
Indeed, back before California ended development controls, my city's planning department effectively ran a huge reverse auction, picking the housing developments that would make the biggest street and park improvements in excess of the statutory minimums to authorize for each year's development quota. (A bit more complicated than that: various ways that the development exceeded building code or had additional amenities also counted for points in the "competition").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M&t=790
But I guess they all had a good laugh in the end, so it doesn't count?