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Serious Ang Moh Trump wants Santa to give him more NUKE Toys!

Ang4MohTrump

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http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20...-arsenal-raises-questions-fears/#.WFz9VuoRXfs


U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes a reporter's question at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday. | AP
WORLD / POLITICS
Trump’s tweet on expanding U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal raises questions and fears
REUTERS
DEC 23, 2016
ARTICLE HISTORY
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WASHINGTON/, PALM BEACH FLORIDA – A call by President-elect Donald Trump for an expansion of the United States’ nuclear capabilities has alarmed nonproliferation experts, who said a boost to the U.S. arsenal could fuel global tensions.

In a Twitter post Thursday, Trump said, “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes” but gave no further details.

It was not clear what prompted his comment. Earlier the same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia needs to “strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces.”

Asked about the tweet, Trump spokesman Jason Miller later said Trump was “referring to the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it — particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue regimes.”

Trump, who will take office on Jan. 20, also has “emphasized the need to improve and modernize our deterrent capability as a vital way to pursue peace through strength,” Miller said.

He said that Trump was not advocating the use of nuclear weapons, and said Trump’s comments were not meant to be read as a new policy proposal.

Experts wondered whether Trump’s brief tweet means he wants to breach limits imposed on U.S. strategic weapons and delivery systems by the 2011 New START treaty with Russia — or plans to expand the non-deployed stockpile.

“It is completely irresponsible for the president-elect or the president to make changes to U.S. nuclear policy in 140 characters and without understanding the implications of statements like ‘expand the capacity,’ ” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a leading proponent of arms control based in Washington.

“He must have leaders around the world trying to guess what he means,” Kimball said in an interview. “This is bush league.”

Putin, who has said that Trump has confirmed to him that he is willing to mend ties between the two countries, also spoke Thursday of the need to enhance Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

“We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems,” he said in a speech in Moscow.

If Trump and Putin both want to expand nuclear weapons, that will effectively end arms control efforts underway since the Nixon administration, said Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a foundation that works to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons.

“This is how arms races begin — with a battle of words,” Cirincione said, urging Trump, a real estate mogul, to “make the biggest deal of his life” and negotiate cuts to the nuclear arsenal with Russia.

“Neither side needs to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear weapons we don’t need,” Cirincione said.

The United States is one of five nuclear weapons states allowed to keep a nuclear arsenal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The others are Russia, Britain, France and China.

Trump’s “farcical” tweet failed to communicate a “rational deterrence policy” and risks fueling arms race dynamics with Russia and China, said Miles Pomper, senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

The United States needs to do more to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands, rather than creating more materials, Pomper said.

“Expanding our nuclear arsenal will do nothing to prevent nuclear proliferation or prevent nuclear terrorism. We have more than enough nuclear weapons as it is,” Pomper said.

Trump, who was elected Nov. 8, campaigned on a platform of building up the U.S. military but also pledged to cut taxes and control federal spending.

Most of the U.S. arsenal was built between 25 and 62 years ago during the arms race with the former Soviet Union, and has been patched and otherwise refashioned many times to extend its life span.

During the next decade, U.S. ballistic missile submarines, bombers and land-based missiles — the three legs of the nuclear triad — are expected to reach the end of their useful lives.

Maintaining and modernizing the arsenal is expected to cost at about $1 trillion over 30 years, according to independent estimates.

Trump’s tweet came the day after his meeting with a dozen Pentagon officials involved with defense acquisition programs.

He also met with the chief executives of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., the two largest U.S. defense contractors, about high-profile projects he said cost too much.

Late Thursday Trump said on Twitter he had asked Boeing to “price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet” because of the “tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35.”

PHOTOS
 
agree with trump. the need to upgrade nuclear forces is overdue. time to junk 5-inch floppy drives.
 
5 inch already upgrade from 5 1/4". the next upgrade is 3.5" or the omega drive
 
He really needs Santa badly.

Americans are fucking bankrupted.

Nuke can hardly afford.

The loaded ran from tax, don't want to pay, moved money out from USA.



http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/0...-corporations-move-profit-to-avoid-taxes.html


Apple’s Move Keeps Profit Out of Reach of Taxes
How Apple and Other Corporations Move Profit to Avoid Taxes


An Apple store in Grand Central. The company borrowed $17 billion in the largest corporate bond offering ever.
LUCAS JACKSON / REUTERS
MAY 2, 2013
High & Low Finance
By FLOYD NORRIS
Why would a company with billions of dollars in the bank — and no plans for a large investment — decide to borrow billions more?

A decade ago, that was a question some short-sellers were asking about Parmalat, the Italian food company that had seemed to be coining money.

It turned out that the answer was not a happy one: The cash was not real. The auditors had been fooled. A huge fraud was being perpetrated.

Now it is a question that could be asked about Apple. Its March 30 balance sheet shows $145 billion in cash and marketable securities. But this week it borrowed $17 billion in the largest corporate bond offering ever.

The answer for Apple is a more comforting one for investors, if not for those of us who pay taxes. The cash is real. But Apple has been a pioneer in tactics to avoid paying taxes to Uncle Sam. To distribute the cash to its owners would force it to pay taxes. So it borrows instead to buy back shares and increase its stock dividend.

The borrowings were at incredibly low interest rates, as low as 0.51 percent for three-year notes and topping out at 3.88 percent for 30-year bonds. And those interest payments will be tax-deductible.

Isn’t that nice of the government? Borrow money to avoid paying taxes, and reduce your tax bill even further.

Could this become the incident that brings on public outrage over our inequitable corporate tax system? Some companies actually pay something close to the nominal 35 percent United States corporate income tax rate. Those unfortunate companies tend to be in businesses like retailing. But companies with a lot of intellectual property — notably technology and pharmaceutical companies — get away with paying a fraction of that amount, if they pay any taxes at all.

Anger at such tax avoidance — we’re talking about presumably legal tax strategies, by the way — has been boiling in Europe, particularly in Britain.


Protests in Britain last December led Starbucks to promise to pay about £10 million, or $16 million, in extra British taxes.
PETER MACDIARMID / GETTY IMAGES
It got so bad that late last year Starbucks promised to pay an extra £10 million — about $16 million — in 2013 and 2014 above what it would normally have had to pay in British income taxes. What it would normally have paid is zero, because Starbucks claims its British subsidiary loses money. Of course, that subsidiary pays a lot for coffee sold to it by a profitable Starbucks subsidiary in Switzerland, and pays a large royalty for the right to use the company’s intellectual property to another subsidiary in the Netherlands. Starbucks said it understood that its customers were angry that it paid no taxes in Britain.

Starbucks could get away with paying no taxes in Britain, and Apple can get away with paying little in the United States relative to the profits it makes, thanks to what Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former chief of staff at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, calls “stateless income,” in which multinational companies arrange to direct the bulk of their profits to low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions in which they may actually have only minimal operations.

Transfer pricing is an issue in all multinational companies and can be used to move profits from one country to another, but it is especially hard for countries to monitor prices on intellectual property, like patents and copyrights. There is unlikely to be a real market for that information, so challenging a company’s pricing is difficult.

“It is easy to transfer the intellectual property to tax havens at a low price,” said Martin A. Sullivan, the chief economist of Tax Analysts, the publisher of Tax Notes. “When a foreign subsidiary pays a low price for this property, and collects royalties, it will have big profits.”

The United States, at least theoretically, taxes companies on their global profits. But taxes on overseas income are deferred until the profits are sent back to the United States.

The company makes no secret of the fact it has not paid taxes on a large part of its profits. “We are continuing to generate significant cash offshore and repatriating this cash will result in significant tax consequences under current U.S. tax law,” the company’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, said last week.

A company spokesman says the company paid $6 billion in federal income taxes last year, and “several billion dollars in income taxes within the U.S. in 2011.” It is a testament to how profitable the company is that it would still face “significant tax consequences” if it used the cash it has to buy back stock.

There is something ridiculous about a tax system that encourages an American company to invest abroad rather than in the United States. But that is what we have.

“The fundamental problem we have in trying to tax corporations is that corporations are global,” says Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “It is very, very hard for national entities to tax entities that are global, particularly when it is hard to know where their income originates.”


In principle, there are two ways the United States could get out of the current mess. The first, proposed by President John F. Kennedy more than 50 years ago, is to end the deferral. Companies would owe taxes on profits when they made them. There would be, of course, credits for taxes paid overseas, but if a company made money and did not otherwise pay taxes on it, it would owe them to the United States. After it paid the taxes, it could move the money wherever it wished without tax consequences.

President Obama has not gone that far, but he has suggested immediate taxation of foreign profits earned in tax havens, defined as countries with very low tax rates.

Some international companies hate that idea, of course. They warn that we would risk making American multinational corporations uncompetitive with other multinationals, and perhaps encourage some of them to change nationality.

The other way is to move to what is called a territorial system, one in which countries tax only profits earned in those countries. Apple would then be free to bring the money home whenever it wanted, tax-free. But without doing something about the ease with which companies manage to claim profits are made wherever it is most convenient, that would simply be a recipe for giving up on collecting tax revenue. Companies around the world have done a good job of persuading countries to lower tax rates. Back in the 1980s, the American corporate tax rate of 34 percent was among the lowest in the world. Now the 35 percent United States tax rate on corporate income is among the highest. In this country, notwithstanding the high rate, the corporate income tax now brings in about 18 percent of all income tax revenue, with individuals paying the rest. That is half the share corporations paid when Dwight Eisenhower was president.

There seems to be something of a consensus developing around the idea that the United States rate should be lowered. Both President Obama and Representative Dave Camp, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, say they want to do that without reducing government revenue, but they disagree on most details. Mr. Camp likes the territorial idea, but he concedes that we would have to do something about the ease with which companies move income from country to country.

In fact, the need for such a rate reduction is not as clear as it might be. Reuven Avi-Yonah, a tax law professor at the University of Michigan, studied the taxes paid by the 100 largest American and European multinationals and found that, on average, the Americans paid lower rates.

Professor Avi-Yonah says he thinks that the developed countries should cooperate and enact similar rules. He compares that to the American Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal for American companies to bribe foreign governments. American companies used to say that was unfair, but now most developed countries have similar laws.

Something like that may be growing a little more likely. At the request of the Group of 20 governments, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is doing a study called BEPS, for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting.

In Europe, where budget problems have grown drastically, there seems to be a growing understanding that governments must raise a certain amount of revenue and a belief that if one sector manages to avoid paying taxes, that means other sectors must pay more. That led to the anti-Starbucks demonstrations in Britain. In this country, there is little sign of similar attitudes, let alone a belief that those who find ways to twist the laws to avoid paying taxes are being unpatriotic.

If that belief were to become widespread, Apple and similar companies might find that their success in avoiding taxes was making them unpopular with other taxpayers — people whom Apple wants to be its customers.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.
 
How to get nuke toys when no tax dollars? Fuck spider lah Beggars!

https://www.google.com.sg/amp/www.f...ney-parked-overseas-until-tax-rates-are-fair/


Apple CEO Says Company Won't Bring Home Money Parked Overseas Until Tax Rates Are 'Fair'
Kelly Phillips Erb , FORBES STAFF

Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers the keynote address at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California, on June 13, 2016. (Photo credit: GABRIELLE LURIE/AFP/Getty Images)

My kids don’t always love the rules in my house. Occasionally, they try to change my mind about them by whining, “It’s not fair.” It never works. There is no level of complaining that will result in my throwing my hands up in the air and conceding, “You’re right, have at it.”


But then I’m not Uncle Sam.

Tech giant Apple is hoping that the United States’ tolerance for pain is a little bit lower than mine. In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook discussed his tenure at Apple and, not surprisingly, fielded questions on Apple’s tax practices, including the company’s decision not to repatriate income earned overseas – at least not just yet. Cook invoked the “f” word when talking about offshore income, saying that he wouldn’t bring over Apple’s overseas funds “until there’s a fair rate,” meaning, of course, a “fair” tax rate, whatever that is.

Cook was referring to the more than $230 billion cash sitting offshore. Parked funds aren’t generally subject to tax – yet. But when (if?) the money comes back home, it will be taxed. With those kind of dollars, Apple expects, per Cook, to pay tax at a 40% tax rate (including state tax rates): that works out to a cool $92 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s twice the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security (downloads as a pdf).

It sounds like a lot, and it is. To be sure, Apple isn’t the only company that’s holding money abroad and waiting for tax reform: companies like Google and Microsoft are said to be following a similar strategy. But don’t fall into the trap of assuming that Apple somehow got caught in a “gotcha” and was forced to keep cash abroad all at once. Cook’s wait and see strategy is nothing new for the company. Apple has been hanging onto profits overseas for years. In 2010, Cook’s predecessor, Steve Jobs noted that company was holding onto cash waiting for “one or more unique strategic opportunities.”

Those strategies appeared to include a repatriation holiday. The push in that direction seemed to be even stronger after Apple signed the lobbying firm of Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock of Washington, D.C. (in 2011, Facebook also signed up with Fierce).


Repatriation holidays, or corporate tax holidays, may be beloved by corporations but are not terribly popular with voters. In 2011, the same year those lobbyists were hard at work, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) – and later, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) – introduced proposals which would allow U.S. corporations holding money offshore to repatriate funds at about 85% less than they would otherwise pay in tax. Rep. Brady said about the bill (subscription required):

This is about creating jobs, expanding U.S. businesses and strengthening American companies.

Those words likely sound familiar. Congress and the President like to use them because they sound great. The catch? Corporate tax holidays don’t exactly work that way. In 2004, President George W. Bush signed into law a repatriation holiday which allowed multinational companies holding funds offshore to bring those into the United States at a reduced tax rate of just 5.25%, dramatically lower than the 35% statutory rate. A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Procedures showed that $315 billion in earnings were repatriated under the 2004 holiday, but most companies did not use those funds for domestic investment.

Those jobs that were to be created? Pfizer repatriated the most money under the 2004 holiday and received criticism for subsequently laying off 3,500 U.S. employees the following year. Similarly, Ford Motor Company repatriated around $850 million under the holiday and then laid off about 10,000 U.S. workers in 2005; Merck repatriated $15.9 billion and announced layoffs of 7,000 workers in 2005). Other companies which did the same included Motorola, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, and Honeywell International.

And that talk about giving American companies an incentive to stay in this country? It likewise didn’t happen. Companies like Apple continued to move jobs and business overseas, parking revenues offshore.


That’s likely why subsequent proposals for corporate tax holidays have been unsuccessful. A variation of a corporate tax holiday using a “reverse Dutch auction” failed in 2014.

So Apple continues to wait. When asked how long the company was willing to wait, Cook responded, “Honestly, I believe the legislature and the administration will agree that it’s in the best interest of the country and the economy to have tax reform. So I don’t think I have to make that decision. I’m optimistic that it will take place next year.”

Reading between the lines: when Congress gives them a break.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to a more “fair” (whatever that means) system, either. I do think we should make it easier, not harder, to do business globally. And that means tax reform. I agree with Cook when he said, “I think it’s in the best interest of the U.S. to have corporate tax reform, regardless of which political party is in charge of the White House.”

I also agree with Cook that the current system of deferral doesn’t work. He noted, “What I’ve always felt should happen is that every dollar should be taxed immediately with no deferral. But as a consequence of doing that, you should have free flow of capital.”


Sounds fabulous, right? Only Cook’s definition of “free flow of capital” and mine are probably a little different. Cook said about Apple, which is currently awaiting a ruling from an investigation by the European Union (EU) into its tax structures and practices, “We didn’t look for a tax haven or something to put it somewhere. We sell a lot of product everywhere.” It’s a curious statement as it hints that a tax-favored jurisdiction Ireland might have simply been a hotbed of iPhone or MacBook activity and not at all attractive for tax reasons (a Senate report indicated that Apple paid an effective tax rate of 2% in Ireland).

Cook denies the allegations made during the EU investigation that Apple benefited from any deal with Ireland, saying, “The structure we have was applicable to everybody — it wasn’t something that was done unique to Apple. It was their law.”

The same commission that is investigating Apple announced in 2015 that “selective tax advantages” granted to Fiat in Luxembourg and Starbucks in the Netherlands were improper. Sweetheart deals in those countries, the Commission found, allowed those companies to artificially lower their tax bills, saving millions in taxes. As a result, the Commission has ordered the companies to repay tens of millions of euros in back taxes. Those decisions are being appealed. Cook indicated, with respect to a similar investigation into Apple’s tax structures, “I don’t know how they will rule. I hope that we get a fair hearing. If we don’t, then we would obviously appeal it.”

And while Ireland also claims that it did nothing wrong, it did switch gears in 2014, with an announcement that it will put an end to tax-favored breaks used by companies like Apple and Google.


Of course, while the current tax laws appear to work for Apple, it doesn’t necessarily mean good things for taxpayers. Martin Sullivan, a former Treasury Department economist who now serves as the chief economist and contributing editor for Tax Analysts’ daily and weekly publications and blog, told The New York Times in 2012, “Apple, like many other multinationals, is using perfectly legal methods to keep a significant portion of their profits out of the hands of the IRS. And when America’s most profitable companies pay less, the general public has to pay more.”

Apple, named by Forbes as the World’s Most Valuable Brand, has long admitted to lowering its tax rate by taking advantage of global tax laws but continues to maintain that they have always acted legally. The company is perhaps best known in the tax world for engineering the Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich tax structure, which has subsequently been taken advantage of by companies like Twitter.

Apple’s tax strategies have not been without controversy in other countries, too. While it waited for the results of the investigation into its tax structures in Ireland, Apple agreed to pony up 318 million euros ($347.72 million U.S.) to settle a tax dispute in Italy related to back taxes. Apple had initially denied the charges in Italy with Cook telling CBS’ 60 Minutes just two weeks before, that “Apple pays every tax dollar we owe,” calling the idea that Apple is avoiding taxes on overseas profits “political crap.”

(You can read Cook’s entire interview with The Washington Post here.)


To be clear, I’m not anti-Apple. In fact, this piece was drafted on my MacBook Air. My law firm has been Apple only since 2000, a byproduct of my husband’s love affair with the company (he was an early Apple adopter thanks to a partnership, of sorts, in the 1980s between his alma mater and the Apple). And I’m not anti-capitalism (I promise you, I like money). As a tax attorney, I understand that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay more in taxes than they are required to. But to refuse to pay up because it’s not “fair” while hundreds of thousands of taxpayers continue to pay doesn’t feel like a tax strategy. It feels like a tantrum. And it wouldn’t work in my house.

Want more taxgirl goodness? Pick your poison: follow me on twitter, hang out on Facebook and Google, play on Pinterest or check out my YouTube channel.
 
will trump arse fark cook and make up with billions in return tax?
 
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