Carl's Jr wants to move its Headquarters (Orange, Stanford: school, university)

[yeahthatguy]

Originally Posted by Highpointer

This shows that the companies that employ many of the smartest people in the world are headquartered in California. Any of these would be dream companies for me to work at, but unfortunately I don't believe that I am smart enough to work at these companies, although I am smart.

It is obvious to anyone that it better for an region to have companies like the ones listed above headquartered in its area rather than fast-food restaurant chains.

Congratulations to California for securing and maintaining the headquarters of these outstanding companies.

More pom pom waving .....

I am smart enough and do.. It's not that serious. and most of these companies have locations all over the U.S and world because talent is all over the U.S and world. Heck, you could even work remotely from wherever you wanted if you are talented enough. California is a beautiful place and a great place to be. Times are a' changing on the tax situation though :
Budget talks dead in Sacramento - San Jose Mercury News
Poll shows public support for Brown's budget plan is slipping - Los Angeles Times
and that is a good thing for California's long term future.

Glad to see things turning towards the right direction. People being able to look at a problem and work at solving it w/o giving up and reaching for the pom poms...

[yeahthatguy]

Originally Posted by dmod

CA has Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple headquarters and they are going nowhere. Facebook just bought a huge facility in Menlo Park to expand. Good luck with your move to Texas.

Texas has google/apple/intel/amd/nvidia/cisco/vmware/oracle ...
So what.. has nothing to do w/ the tax discussion in CA.
I never said I was moving to Texas btw. The convo derailed into a (this state) vs. that state and I was more than happy to entertain it.

Cheers

[TimC2462]

Originally Posted by dmod

CA has Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple headquarters and they are going nowhere. Facebook just bought a huge facility in Menlo Park to expand. Good luck with your move to Texas.

Facebook has over 1700 employees in 12 different countries. Ownership is divided up by investors who live all over the world. They are basically a website that collects revenue from advertising all over the world. They don't deal with customers or anything physical in California -- it's all virtual. Same goes for Twitter.

Apple and Google are indeed headquartered in California. But you forgot to mention that Apple's products are manufactured in China and instead of opening a facility here in California, Apple decided to open one in Utah.

As for Google, well... we should all remember the following article:

Google Avoids Taxes, Uses Scheme That Costs U.S. $60 Billion

[yeahthatguy]

Originally Posted by TimC2462

Facebook has over 1700 employees in 12 different countries. Ownership is divided up by investors who live all over the world. They are basically a website that collects revenue from advertising all over the world. They don't deal with customers or anything physical in California -- it's all virtual. Same goes for Twitter.

Apple and Google are indeed headquartered in California. But you forgot to mention that Apple's products are manufactured in China and instead of opening a facility here in California, Apple decided to open one in Utah.

As for Google, well... we should all remember the following article:

Google Avoids Taxes, Uses Scheme That Costs U.S. $60 Billion

And look what one of the mentioned companies is complaining about (taxes):
City Tax Battle Isn’t About a Two-Year Break. It’s About Repealing the Payroll Tax Completely

[TimC2462]

Originally Posted by yeahthatguy

And look what one of the mentioned companies is complaining about (taxes):
City Tax Battle Isn’t About a Two-Year Break. It’s About Repealing the Payroll Tax Completely

Crazy.

I have no love for a company trying to weasle its way out of paying their fair share of taxes.

But I also have no love for extreme leftist liberals like those in San Francisco who wants to tax everything including the gas I fart out of my arse.

[yeahthatguy]

Originally Posted by TimC2462

Crazy.

I have no love for a company trying to weasle its way out of paying their fair share of taxes.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by TimC2462

But I also have no love for extreme leftist liberals like those in San Francisco who wants to tax everything including the gas I fart out of my arse.

Agreed. LOL. Time for sleep (Zzzz)

[Oerdin]

Originally Posted by user_id

We are, the universities in California are play a huge role in making businesses want to come and stay in California. That was my point initial point, taxes do not play a major role in business decisions. But that should be obvious to anybody that doesn't have their head in the sand, the states with the highest GDP (raw or per-capita) are the states with the highest taxes.

Agreed. Payroll costs are often 15-25 times the total cost of taxes and the difference between supposedly low tax Texas and supposedly high tax California (net on total tax burden) is with in 2 percentage base points on average though I concede that if someone is an extremely high earner (several million per year) than it would make sense for them to move to a state which doesn't have an income taxes. For 95% plus of us though, including most businesses, the tax difference is very small.

For a very low margin business, like a fastfood company, where they dodn't need skilled workers then that 2 base point difference can make the difference between profit or lose. So I can see why Carl's Jr would care but most businesses aren't on razor thin margins like fastfood companies (remember the price of a basic fastfood hamburger has been the same for 20 years so they literally have to get every possible penny in savings our they're toast in that business). Now, most businesses which require skilled labor care a hell of a lot more about being able to find a large pool of such skilled workers. That's why Google and HP stay put in California even while Carl's Jr leaves. They don't care if the total tax bill is two base points higher because they know they can't find the skilled workers they need in fly over country and that's way more important to them.

Education is indeed a big way to bump up economic performance over the long term and California does indeed benefit from having so many top schools here. Just look at all the startups in California which recent college grads started which went big time. That said, education is one of those long term economic issues which takes lots of upfront investment and you likely won't get the positive payout until decades down the road. A child doesn't grow up, finish college, and start their own business (or go to work for an existing business) in a day. California's advantage is we have been shelling out big for education since the late 40's-early 50's so companies due indeed want to be here because the workers they need are here but that's the upper middle to highest skilled workers.

The low skill to lower middle skill workers have found that their jobs can be exported to other states (that's a small factor on total employment but key in some industries such as heavy polluters like oil refining or low margin businesses like fastfood) or, more likely, get off shored to China. That middle part is what we need to revive if we want a true economic recovery because the Chinese are going to keep moving up the skill chain threatening more and more jobs which require higher skills. I honestly don't see how we can do that without tariffs or some sort of action to prevent China from artificially lowering the value of their currency (thus improving China's total employment but causing mass job loses in the rest of the world).

[Oerdin]

These are from a few years ago but they might help to add some facts to this discussion.

2008-2009 budget expenditures:


2008-2009 sources of income for the state:

[Oerdin]

Prior to prop 13 local school districts were funded by local property tax revenue but prop 13 so gutted the main source of funding for local schools that many of them found they were completely unable to pay for it post prop 13. Minorities also complained that well off districts, which were almost always the whitest districts, got up to four times as much funding per student then poor districts, which were mostly black and/or hispanic. This was because rich areas paid more in property taxes than poor areas thus the difference in per student spending.

Post prop 13 (this is in the 70's) the state decided to take on K-12 education funding since most local districts claimed they couldn't pay for it post prop 13 and they agreed to pay every district the same amount of money per student per day no matter where in the state the school was located (this created it's own whole new set of problems which I won't go into). To pay for this they expanded the state income tax, which previously only the ultra wealthy had to pay, so that most people ended up having to pay something but they graduated the rates progressively so that average people paid about the same post prop 13 as they did pre-prop 13 (that is prop 13 gave people a big reduction in property taxes but the new income tax took it back). That's why the state now gets 44.7% of it's money from income taxes (which still doesn't pay the whole 51% of the budget which education eats up); essentially prop 13 slashed property taxes and locks them in at an artificially low rate so the state tries to make up that money via an income tax but income tax payments very heavily based on the economy while property tax rates are usually very consistent year after year no matter if the economy is good or bad. That's one reason why the state government always seems to have boom years with tons of revenue followed by bust years with big deficits. Our tax system pretty much causes that and it all goes back to prop 13.

[user_id]

Originally Posted by TimC2462

Apple and Google are indeed headquartered in California. But you forgot to mention that Apple's products are manufactured in China and instead of opening a facility here in California, Apple decided to open one in Utah.

I'm not sure why people have a hard time grasping that different areas of the country are good for different things. It would make no sense to build say...a customer service center in the bay area. Not because the taxes, but because the cost of real estate, which is related to the demographic of the area. You don't build factories, customer service, centers, etc in areas that have a highly educated population. You build them in areas that have an ample supply of low/mid skill laborers.

You won't find a single large corporation that only has offices, etc in one region/state. That is especially true of research oriented companies, these companies will build faculties near intellectual hubs.

How many of the highly successful start-ups over the last 50 years or so were created in low-tax, low-service states? Few.