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Apple has more cash than the US Government

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Started 9 months ago by News
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News
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Apple now has more cash than the U.S. government
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
July 29, 2011

(CNN) -- Maybe the cash-strapped U.S. government should start selling iPads. According to the latest statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance Wednesday of $73.8 billion. That's still a lot of money, but it's less than what Steve Jobs has lying around.

Tech juggernaut Apple had a whopping $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of June, according to its last earnings report. Unlike the U.S. government, which is scrambling to avoid defaulting on its debt, Apple takes in more money than it spends.

READ MORE: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/07/29/apple.cash.government/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

Posted 9 months ago #
Anne
King Lincoln
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Apple must not pay enough taxes

Posted 9 months ago #
anillo
Marzipan City
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The US gov't is worth more than Apple though..

Posted 9 months ago #
berdawn
near that stretch of N. High Street in the Short North
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Is Apple going to regulate my air and water quality, too?

Posted 9 months ago #
rus

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Anne said:
Apple must not pay enough taxes

Or the government spends too much.

Posted 9 months ago #
gramarye
In Exile
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anillo said:
The US gov't is worth more than Apple though..

True, but Apple also has zero debt, IIRC, other than short-term payables. The U.S. government still has positive net worth in current terms, but its future liabilities are over $100 trillion. I doubt that even the U.S. would be considered solvent on a balance sheet basis if we had to recognize those future liabilities on our books. (The U.S. government also has the dubious advantage of not having to follow the accounting rules of private companies.)

Posted 9 months ago #
berdawn
near that stretch of N. High Street in the Short North
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I can't believe people are taking comparing the financial position of a private company to that of a government.

Posted 9 months ago #
jimbach
Short North (WP division)
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I saw this news story a few days ago, and I started thinking about the role of government (generally, not in a left<-->right way), and I guess the best way to put it is this way - is anything that is not inherently profitable worth doing? Is building a navy funded entirely through private subscriptions possible? How about a system of roads, or a postal system, or...?

Probably not. But we need them anyway. This is, to put it bluntly, why we have a government. To provide those things that the market cannot - anything from a military to social services for the poor and indigent (and anything in between a majority of elected representatives can agree upon.) Disagreements over the "sweet spot" of where government-funded services should stop is what determines ideology and, by extension, political parties.

This is why comparisons between government and private industry, especially with regards to efficiency, are useless. Governments exist because profits and markets and their incentives can't provide for everything people want and need.

Posted 9 months ago #
Walker
The KLD / Downtown
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berdawn said:
Is Apple going to regulate my air and water quality, too?

iAir and iWater sound like amazing products.

Posted 9 months ago #
gramarye
In Exile
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jimbach said:
I saw this news story a few days ago, and I started thinking about the role of government (generally, not in a left<-->right way), and I guess the best way to put it is this way - is anything that is not inherently profitable worth doing? Is building a navy funded entirely through private subscriptions possible? How about a system of roads, or a postal system, or...?

* * *

This is why comparisons between government and private industry, especially with regards to efficiency, are useless. Governments exist because profits and markets and their incentives can't provide for everything people want and need.

If you substitute "profitability" for "efficiency," then I'd agree with you. Efficiency, though, is something that governments can (and need to) learn to do, hard as it may be. I agree with you about not judging military, police, parks, etc. on a profitability basis.

Efficiency is a different matter. We may have good roads, but that doesn't mean that they were efficiently built, or that building them at all was efficient (even if the construction process itself had been a model of efficiency). We certainly have a very effective military, but that doesn't mean that all military spending is efficient. We have a mix of good and bad schools, but even some good schools in terms of pure effectiveness still might not be models of efficiency; they just have a lot of money to throw around and good students to begin with. Etc. etc. etc.

Posted 9 months ago #
rus

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jimbach said:
I saw this news story a few days ago, and I started thinking about the role of government (generally, not in a left<-->right way), and I guess the best way to put it is this way - is anything that is not inherently profitable worth doing? Is building a navy funded entirely through private subscriptions possible? How about a system of roads, or a postal system, or...?

There is precedent for a private Navy:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Privateer

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robert_Morris_%28financier%29

Morris's wealth increased thanks to privateers that seized the cargo of English ships during the war. Morris owned an interest in many privateer ships, and also helped to sell off the English spoils as they came into port. While he was seen as profiting handsomely from this activity he wrote a friend that he lost over 150 ships during the war and so came out "about even." In fact he had lost one of the largest private navies in the world during the Revolutionary War, but he never asked for reimbursement.

Even today, there's some:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/insurance-firms-plan-private-navy-to-take-on-somali-pirates-2091298.html

On the post office, there's Fed-ex, UPS...

Perhaps, in terms of:

"This is, to put it bluntly, why we have a government. To provide those things that the market cannot "

what the market can, or cannot, provide isn't always fixed.

Also, note that "efficiency" in terms of government operations is not always about comparing government to private sector. It can be about how easy regulations are to follow, the effectiveness of those regulations in achieving stated goals, etc.

Posted 9 months ago #
Pablo
Crestview Addition
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When Fed-Ex & UPS start delivering letters across town in a day for 44 cents I'll start using them.

Posted 9 months ago #
jimbach
Short North (WP division)
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Pablo said:
When Fed-Ex & UPS start delivering letters across town in a day for 44 cents I'll start using them.

No, when FedEx or UPS start delivering letters to a small town in Alaska for $.44, then we can get rid of the post office. All those letters you send to the same zip code subsidize inexpensive mail delivery to isolated communities across the country.

Posted 9 months ago #
rus

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jimbach said:
No, when FedEx or UPS start delivering letters to a small town in Alaska for $.44, then we can get rid of the post office. All those letters you send to the same zip code subsidize inexpensive mail delivery to isolated communities across the country.

Or you could use email... perhaps with subsidized bandwidth, true.

Which brings us back to the efficiency argument... as a thought exercise, if the idea is to maintain communication with isolated communities and those communities are served by both subsidized bandwidth and postal service, then that's a redundant effort.

Posted 9 months ago #
Pablo
Crestview Addition
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jimbach said:
No, when FedEx or UPS start delivering letters to a small town in Alaska for $.44, then we can get rid of the post office. All those letters you send to the same zip code subsidize inexpensive mail delivery to isolated communities across the country.

I wasn't advocating for the elimination of the USPS, just pointing out that the USPS is still a cheaper way to send stuff. I'm all for govt. providing services that private businesses can't, won't or shouldn't...

Posted 9 months ago #
Twixlen
Westgate, Columbus
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rus said:
Or you could use email... perhaps with subsidized bandwidth, true.

Which brings us back to the efficiency argument... as a thought exercise, if the idea is to maintain communication with isolated communities and those communities are served by both subsidized bandwidth and postal service, then that's a redundant effort.

But that assumes a level of technology & infrastructure that likely doesn't exist. There are still places where electricity is still a fairly precious commodity, particularly in the depths of the winter months. USPS isn't efficient - but it's equal.

Posted 9 months ago #
rus

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Twixlen said:
But that assumes a level of technology & infrastructure that likely doesn't exist. There are still places where electricity is still a fairly precious commodity, particularly in the depths of the winter months. USPS isn't efficient - but it's equal.

Continuing the thought exercise, then it wouldn't make sense to subsidize bandwidth to a location without a stable energy supply.

Point: just because the government can do something doesn't mean it should ( inverse would also be true... just because government doesn't do something doesn't mean it shouldn't ).

Posted 9 months ago #
gramarye
In Exile
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Twixlen said:
But that assumes a level of technology & infrastructure that likely doesn't exist. There are still places where electricity is still a fairly precious commodity, particularly in the depths of the winter months. USPS isn't efficient - but it's equal.

Is it? Physical delivery in Eighth Circle of the Abyss, MT or Frozenhades, ND in the depths of winter isn't exactly as efficient as delivering to anywhere in Columbus, either.

Posted 9 months ago #
rus

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Seems as good a place as any for this:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/its-public-opinion-stupid

Ronald Reagan was successful because public opinion supported him: he wanted to cut taxes and raise defense spending and so did big chunks of the public. He was leading in a direction that they already wanted to go.

But no matter how many times we try to kid ourselves with one poll result or another, liberals just don't have that advantage. The public is mostly in favor of raising taxes on the rich — though I suspect its support is pretty soft — but on the bigger issues they mostly aren't on our side. They think deficits are bad, they don't trust Keynesian economics, they don't want a higher IRS bill (who does, after all?), and they believe the federal government is spending too much on stuff they don't really understand. Conservatives have just flat out won this debate in recent decades, and until that changes we're not going to be able to make much progress.

This is why I blame the broad liberal community for our failures, not just President Obama. My biggest beef with Obama is the same one I had three years ago, namely that he's never really even tried to move public opinion in a specifically progressive direction. But that hardly even matters unless all the rest of us have laid the groundwork. And we haven't. Wonks, hacks, activists, all of us. We just haven't persuaded the public to support our vision of government. Until we do, the tea party tendency will always be more powerful than we are.

Posted 9 months ago #
myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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rus said:
Seems as good a place as any for this:

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/its-public-opinion-stupid

Ronald Reagan was successful because public opinion supported him: he wanted to cut taxes and raise defense spending and so did big chunks of the public. He was leading in a direction that they already wanted to go.

But no matter how many times we try to kid ourselves with one poll result or another, liberals just don't have that advantage. The public is mostly in favor of raising taxes on the rich — though I suspect its support is pretty soft — but on the bigger issues they mostly aren't on our side. They think deficits are bad, they don't trust Keynesian economics, they don't want a higher IRS bill (who does, after all?), and they believe the federal government is spending too much on stuff they don't really understand. Conservatives have just flat out won this debate in recent decades, and until that changes we're not going to be able to make much progress.

This is why I blame the broad liberal community for our failures, not just President Obama. My biggest beef with Obama is the same one I had three years ago, namely that he's never really even tried to move public opinion in a specifically progressive direction. But that hardly even matters unless all the rest of us have laid the groundwork. And we haven't. Wonks, hacks, activists, all of us. We just haven't persuaded the public to support our vision of government. Until we do, the tea party tendency will always be more powerful than we are.

I think's Drum's missing the point on why a politician is a politician. Obama's job, as a politician of the democratic party is to move the public opinion needle where it better reflects democratic party priorities. Otherwise, why is he even a politician in a party in the first place? That he steadfastly refuses to do so, despite being armed to the policy teeth by the same wonks/hacks/etc that Drum disparages, is what frustrates his supporters.

Politicians have to carry the water the last mile for the policy guys. The reps falls all over themselves to carry the right's policy water to the people, and there's a serious expectation that should they refuse to do so, they will suffer as politicians.

Posted 9 months ago #