<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>WildUtah</author><text>The US tax code heavily punishes companies that hold cash in a variety of ways. The motive is to subsidize banks by requiring companies to rely on short term debt for operations. It&amp;#x27;s the biggest and most lucrative of subsidies for the banking industry and laundering such subsidies is how many bankers get rich. For instance, Mitt Romney made his money that way.&lt;p&gt;(The main tax code subsidies here are the business interest loophole and the accumulated earnings tax)&lt;p&gt;Usually a big company holds almost no liquid assets and hands profits out to bondholders and shareholders or invests actively to grow, even in unrelated businesses. That&amp;#x27;s to avoid tax penalties.&lt;p&gt;Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the like are holding masses of cash outside the USA. Gridlock in Washington and a stagnant and irrational corporate tax code make it very hard to bring cash home to invest for American companies. Therefore you find tech companies with few overseas expenses exporting services and accumulating cash they can&amp;#x27;t bring home.&lt;p&gt;(The main tax issue here is the non-territorial tax system in the USA. All other developed countries have a territorial system.)&lt;p&gt;Other countries can see this is a problem that kills jobs and wages at home so they don&amp;#x27;t do it. Obama has tried to fix it and Trump&amp;#x27;s main tax proposal is aimed at it, but both parties in Congress block change. Republicans don&amp;#x27;t want to hand Obama a victory and would rather hand out goodies to donors with loopholes than simplify taxes and Democrats just want to punish profitable multinationals even if it kills jobs.&lt;p&gt;And Wall Street is very mercurial with credit for tech companies, especially growing ones, so they can&amp;#x27;t rely on the banking subsidies.&lt;p&gt;The result is that tech giants are the only companies with a reason to accumulate cash so they overwhelmingly are the only ones that do so.&lt;p&gt;In summary, this is a government regulatory policy that creates cash rich tech companies. It&amp;#x27;s a result of bad decisions on Capitol Hill, not on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road. It is not a stock valuation or corporate strategy issue.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Apple, Microsoft, and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2016/apple-microsoft-google-hold-nearly-quarter-u-s-corporate-cash/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>boxy310</author><text>There was a very interesting article in the NY Times earlier this year about this subject:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For other industries, though, a dollar of savings is worth a lot more than itself. For pharmaceutical companies, a dollar in savings is worth $1.50. For software firms, it’s even higher: more than $2. This means that investors are behaving as if they trust the executives in these industries, like Larry Page of Alphabet, to be smarter about using that money than the investors themselves could be. ...&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Why? The answer, perhaps, is that both the executives and the investors in these industries believe that something big is coming, but — this is crucial — they’re not sure what it will be. Through the 20th century, as we shifted from a horse-and-sun-powered agrarian economy to an electricity-and-motor-powered industrial economy to a silicon-based information economy, it was clear that every company had to invest in the new thing that was coming. These were big, expensive investments in buildings and machinery and computer technology. Today, though, value is created far more through new ideas and new ways of interaction. Ideas appear and spread much more quickly, and their worth is much harder to estimate.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;why-are-corporations-hoarding-trillions.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nytimes.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;24&amp;#x2F;magazine&amp;#x2F;why-are-corporati...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The implication is that big tech companies see some very disruptive trends coming down the pipeline, but they&amp;#x27;re not sure which specific idea or ideas should take most of the investment, and they&amp;#x27;re hedging their bets by hoarding cash for now. Maybe when the AI&amp;#x2F;automation revolution kicks into high gear, we&amp;#x27;ll finally see what they spend all this money on.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Apple, Microsoft, and Google hold 23% of all U.S. corporate cash</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2016/apple-microsoft-google-hold-nearly-quarter-u-s-corporate-cash/</url></story>