‘Is That a Trick Question?’
16th May 2013
Cook is expected to appear in front of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to explain why Apple has failed to repatriate up to $100bn in cash stashed in foreign countries.
Uh, so that they don’t lose 35% of it to the IRS? That’s just a guess, you understand….
Had Cupertino returned its money to the US, it would have been hit with a punitive 35 per cent tax rate, meaning it was cheaper in the long run to issue bonds and pay interest at market rates.
The technical financial term for that is ‘DUH’.
The investigations committee has also grilled other companies that use slick methods to keep their tax bills down, including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.
‘Slick methods’ meaning ‘perfectly legal methods that the all-your-money-is-ours crowd don’t like and so have made up a derogatory term for’. (Unfortunately, they can’t be called ‘tax cheats’, legitimately, because they aren’t cheating; they’re following the law. Although that doesn’t prevent some of the all-for-the-state crowd doing it anyway. You know how they are.)
An Apple spokesman insisted the firm paid all its taxes. “We’ve been working with the subcommittee to answer their questions about Apple, and we welcome any further questions they might have,” Apple said in a statement. “Apple is one of the largest taxpayers in the United States, having paid $6 billion in federal corporate income tax in fiscal 2012.”
It’s not enough, of course; it’s never enough. As long as you have money left after the taxman gets done with you, you are somehow a ‘dodger’.
May 17th, 2013 at 12:01
The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Apple is prosperous and chic. No better target for the greedy.