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  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    01/17, 10:30pm | report spam | Reply |

    hmmm

    Bush comes out with a proposal to eliminate taxes on dividends and MS comes out with its first ever dividend, resulting in a tax free payment to Bill Gates of almost $90 million? Coincidence anyone?

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    01/18, 01:56am | report spam | Reply |

    No conspiracy here...

    Most observers peg Gates as a Democrat, or, at the very least, supportive of liberal causes.

    And critics have been harping enlessly over a year now for Microsoft to start paying a dividend.

    Besides which, $90 million is a drop in the bucket for him. He'll probably donate most of that to charity.

    Gates generally has no problem paying taxes. His father is the one of the most vocal opponents of the repeal of the estate tax (dubbed the "death tax" by conservatives). They think the estate tax helps to encourage philanthropy among the wealthy by discouraging them to hoard their wealth and pass it on wholesale to their heirs.

    Not to mention, $40+ billion in hard cash in the bank is enough, even for Microsoft. There's a certain point where trying to figure out what to do with so much money gets problematic; you can only buy so many Treasury bills.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    01/18, 09:02am | report spam | Reply |

    Sun struggling

    If only Sun had a user friendly operating system, so that they could appeal to more than just the server market when times are hard. Anyone for a Sun-Apple merger thread?

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    01/18, 09:42am | report spam | Reply |

    Re: hmmm

    Bush comes out with a proposal to eliminate taxes on dividends and MS comes out with its first ever dividend, resulting in a tax free payment to Bill Gates of almost $90 million? Coincidence anyone?

    Please, they don't need to do c*** like that to get money to bill. Just have the company buy some of his stock. And the law states that you don't have to give the dividend to get a tax break, so they could've just announced that they had money for a dividend, so then people could get the break.

    All told, though, my co-worker who's into the stock market says this is actually bad news (why the markets went down) because dividends are a way companies give money back to their shareholders when they know that's the only way to do so (i.e. the stock is going to be flat for a long period of time, so investors won't make it up in face value, so let's give dividends). Whether that's from people realizing that MS products suck, ain't worth paying for the incessant upgrades and just use what they got, or even more serious troubles for MS and the tech industry in general, it ain't good news, not even for Billy Boy).

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    01/18, 04:31pm | report spam | Reply |

    Re:No conspiracy here...

    Most observers peg Gates as a Democrat

    Er, no...

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