<story><title>Iowa&apos;s handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-apple-iowa-welfare-20170829-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colechristensen</author><text>These are property tax abatements.  I don&amp;#x27;t see the big deal.  Apple has to pay the property tax equal to the farmland for the next 20 years instead of the much higher tax on the datacenter property.  Who cares?  Unless someone is arguing the datacenter is going to use a lot of tax funded city services (police? fire? ... ?), Waukee isn&amp;#x27;t giving Apple anything. On top of that Apple is pledging to give them $100M  for various things.  Seems more like instead of paying property taxes, Apple is donating money to the city which will probably get it an income tax deduction.  It&amp;#x27;s a scam I don&amp;#x27;t really care about.&lt;p&gt;If you do care about it, maybe you should be complaining much more about all of the corporations that are &amp;quot;Delaware&amp;quot; corporations to avoid state taxes instead of being corporations where they&amp;#x27;re actually located.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fulafel</author><text>Companies are supposed to pay taxes so we can have schools, healthcare, basic income etc. When they bid countries or states against each other to get tax breaks and governments play the game, citizens lose.&lt;p&gt;Yes, it happens in other cases too, and citizens should also protest against those other cases.</text></comment>
<story><title>Iowa&apos;s handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals</title><url>http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-apple-iowa-welfare-20170829-story.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>colechristensen</author><text>These are property tax abatements.  I don&amp;#x27;t see the big deal.  Apple has to pay the property tax equal to the farmland for the next 20 years instead of the much higher tax on the datacenter property.  Who cares?  Unless someone is arguing the datacenter is going to use a lot of tax funded city services (police? fire? ... ?), Waukee isn&amp;#x27;t giving Apple anything. On top of that Apple is pledging to give them $100M  for various things.  Seems more like instead of paying property taxes, Apple is donating money to the city which will probably get it an income tax deduction.  It&amp;#x27;s a scam I don&amp;#x27;t really care about.&lt;p&gt;If you do care about it, maybe you should be complaining much more about all of the corporations that are &amp;quot;Delaware&amp;quot; corporations to avoid state taxes instead of being corporations where they&amp;#x27;re actually located.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Clubber</author><text>Yes, anyone can use that. If you buy a bunch of property, just plant trees and get the state &amp;#x2F; city to come out and verify that you are growing trees and your property taxes are 1&amp;#x2F;10th of what they were. Trees are probably the lowest maintenance crop you can grow, and the property might already have them.&lt;p&gt;We had a family that owned a &lt;i&gt;LOT&lt;/i&gt; of land in our city put a few cows on it to save money on property taxes.</text></comment>