Also, thanks to lobbying from me. If I buy tickets to something and later find out I can't attend, I want to be able to give or sell those tickets to a friend.
Honestly, it shouldn't even be legal to eat anything other than broccoli and chicken breast. Everything is filled with fat and sugar and just drags our healthcare system down.
That website you linked to is bizarre. You claim they donate to "some not-that-great people" then link to website showing they donate to a lot of great people. Were you trying to undermine yourself or did you accidentally link to the wrong page?
The paid an effective tax rate of 25% over the last 9 months.
Also, I fail to see how it would diminish the achievement even if they weren't paying taxes. $1 trillion is extraordinarily valuable. There is zero chance you could create a company that big even if all your taxes were waived.
$130M across four companies is nowhere near as severe a penalty as a $5B fine for one company. When you factor in that they've also extracted fines of $120M, $730M, $1B and $15B from Facebook, Microsoft, Intel and Apple, this is actually pretty clear proof that the EU is much tougher on US companies.
Android won't be free if this fine withstands appeal. No company is going to suffer billion dollars fines to give away free software. Google will have no choice but start charging OEMs to use android, and OEMs will have no choice but to pass the costs onto their customers. This ruling is a loss for everybody.
The EU is beyond corrupt. The European commission under its current leadership hasn't issued a fine on this scale to a single European company, but has somehow managed to extract billions of dollars from Google, Apple, Facebook, and more. The US government needs to respond swiftly and decisively to show the EU this is unacceptable. Violence should not be off the table.
If you add up all that money, most people could save $100+ per month. Add in an employer match for 401k and you're saving $200 per month. With 5% real return in the stock market, most people could have $400k saved up by the time they hit 70. That's nothing to sneeze at, and anybody can achieve it if they're prudent.
Maybe if you were working instead of squandering your money and time on videogames, your reality wouldn't be so brutal.
With the money they use to go to bars, pay for netflix, eat out at restaurants, go to concerts, buy video games, etcetera etcetera. Almost every person who claims to have no money to invest actually has plenty of money; they just squander it on immediate gratification.