Re: US "favorable corporate tax structure"
"Apple pays about a 30% rate on the money they make in the US."
Apple's own income report says they pay 26%, which is below the median for S&P companies.
"They are and for the last several years have been the single largest taxpayer in the United States. Larger than any bank, oil company, or billionaire investor."
You've made this claim repeatedly, as has Tim Cook. It's not actually true, though.
Apple allocated $19b in US taxes for 2015. Exxon Mobile paid out $27 billion in the same year, and has paid more than Apple every year that both companies have existed. This is partly due to oil companies having extra taxes that Apple don't have to contend with; if you want to just take certain individual taxes (corporate income tax, say) then Apple pays more. But no, it has never, ever been the US's largest overall tax payer; and 2015 was an unusual year - Apple's tax bill is usually much less than half that.
It's also probably not Ireland's biggest tax payer, either - Cook stated that Apple paid $400 million in tax in 2014 (about 330 million euro) That would be less than Medtronic's 712 million euros, or even second-place AIB's 534 million. Cook just pulls these claims out of his arse, and then you regurgitate them in comments section after comments section.
Even if it were true, however, it's utterly meaningless to say that the most profitable company in the world pays the most tax. It is supposed to. If I pay 10% tax on an income of 300 billion, I've paid more than a guy paying 80% tax on an income of $30,000 dollars. Does that mean it's somehow OK that I have a tax rate more appropriate for minimum-wage cleaning staff while the other dude is paying 80% of his income? No, of course it doesn't. It's imbecilic reasoning, being used to justify paying minuscule tax rates. Yeah, doesn't mean you're not cheating
On average, over the last half a dozen years, Apple have paid about $8 billion a year in tax. That's about the same as Walmart paid on average, which has less than a third of Apple's income over the period.
So yeah, all the bullshit about Apple being 'the world's biggest taxpayer' or 'the US's biggest taxpayer' or whatever is just that: bullshit. It's a lie, and even if it weren't a lie it would still mean nothing. Stop saying it.
"If taxes were due on money made overseas in the year it was earned, like it is for US income, companies wouldn't go to such great lengths to avoid taxes overseas, so long as the US tax rate was higher. What would be the point of complex structures to lower your overseas tax liability when you'd pay your savings to the IRS, dollar for dollar? That's what the other countries should lobby the US to change."
This, I agree with; the main problem is the screwed up US tax laws that permit you to hold a cash mountain offshore indefinitely. This is incredibly damaging the world economy, as it sits idle in tax havens rather than being redirected into productive investment. There's up to $32 trillion - worth roughly twice the US economy - in such deposits sitting doing nothing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
