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beberly37 comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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This brings to mind the dollar-coin-frequent-flyer-miles scam a few years ago. Where basically, the US treasury started making dollar coins and no one used them. To encourage their circulation, they would sell boxes of coins online with free shipping. Munchkins started buying them with credit cards that gave frequent flier miles, then would deposit the coins at their bank and pay off the credit card. Result: millions of frequent flier miles for free.
The US treasury no longer accepts credit cards for online dollar coin purchases.
Where's the scam in this story?
I guess I should have said scheme.
Would you say that anything which isn't explicitly forbidden is fair game, and cannot be a scam?
To me a scam involves some kind of deception. I don't see anyone being deceived, exactly. It's not as if the munchkins were lying about whether their credit cards gave frequent flier miles.
It's fair game according to the definition at the beginning of the OP, but when gaming human-made real-world rules, one should be aware that if it works, and it's against the intention of the rules, the rules are likely to be changed to prevent it. There's a certain amount of anti-inductiveness in the activity. See the running battle between tax legislators and tax accountants, which has recently come to public attention in the UK with the news that the UK operations of Starbucks, Google, and Apple apparently make hardly any profit to be taxed on.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, there's been informal internal discussions.)
What seems like it might be going on isn't that Google et. al are doing anything unusual, so much as they're taking advantage of loopholes that may have been established for the benefit of other industries, without paying off the politicians. The reasonable thing to do would be to change the laws, not to target individual companies.
I can't say I'm very familiar with the details, though.
Well, I don't work for Google (though sometimes I wish I did), but I agree that any company which does not use all the available rules to minimize its taxes should have its CFO fired. After all, that's what a person would do if she found out that the person doing her taxes deliberately does not maximize her return.
Of course, there is a difference between maximizing your tax return this one year and carefully milking the loopholes for decades. Google is not doing a good job of the latter, so whoever is responsible for Google PR should be replaced with someone more competent.
Capital prices are more about relative competitiveness than absolute competitiveness. If every hundred dollars makes $4 instead of $5 next year because of closed tax loopholes, and your investment now makes $400 a year instead of $500 because of those same closed tax loopholes, then your investment hasn't changed price.
Depending on the PR costs to support these tax loopholes, Google may even be better off closing them - so long as the PR costs are expensive enough, and the tax loopholes benefit everyone equally. The whole industry makes less money, the government gets more money, and Google saves on PR costs, providing a relative advantage and increasing their stock price.