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Senate investigators: Apple sheltered $44 billion from taxes

Let's fix you up on this. Apple effectively purchased tax savings by hiring expensive professionals to engineer no-nexus areas. That is extremely anti-competitive.

Tell me, as a "conservative" how you can advocate the unleveling of the playing field where groups with more money simply buy success? How is that good for the economy?

What do you think they paid in addition to what they would pay just competent accountants? I'm guessing it was not a billion dollars. So no, they didn't purchase tax savings the way you think they did. And no, they didn't unlevel the playing field. But they do sell a lot of merchandise and services, and employ a lot of people. Unlike the crappy solar business that our government has flushed hundreds of millions of our tax dollars down the economic toilet, Apple has been very good for the economy.


Funny. You think statutory rates matter. US effective Corporate tax rates are some of the lowest. Well, there goes any credibly you had on corporate taxes. Statutory matter. What a joke.

See what Apple is doing, that is why the effective rates are low. It is not because we have low rates, we don't. It is because our high rates drive companies to take these extreme measures. If the rates where competitive, it wouldn't be worth it to go to locations that have no other draw. Still think the statutory rates don't matter?

I really see no reason for the snarky comments like "what a joke".

They really don't garner you any respect at all. But, I guess we all have a lapse once in a while.
 
Why should it be illegal? Does the government have a right to our money?

Herin,

This is the type of hypocrisy and deceit many Americans have been talking about for quite some time. If you didn't understand it with all the discussions concerning Mitt Romney and Bain Capital in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, you didn't pay attention. If you didn't listen to the arguments out of Congress during the BP oil spill, you didn't pay attention. And if you didn't hear the arguments during the debates to end the Bush tax cuts, you weren't paying attention.

Apple, like Shell Oil, like Chevron, like GE and like so many other major corporations and much like Mitt Romney can all rightly claim "they didn't violate the law and only paid their share of taxes under the law" because in most cases they did. But if you paid attention to all the arguments, what you would have learned was that many of these wealthy corporations used tax loopholes so as NOT to pay the true amount of taxes they would have ordinarily paid had they NOT used these tax shelters. Now, mind you I'm not talking about tax credits, not in and of themselves. Tax credits allow you to take a deduction on money you earned and rightly spent provided certain conditions are met, i.e., energy proof your home by adding an energy efficient appliance or a solar panel, you get a tax credit (or as some would call it, a rebate). Are you now saying that Mitt Romeny was wrong to want to close many of these corporate tax loopholes? Because what this truly amounts to is "corporate welfare" - companies claiming they've generated revenue but all they've really done is take full advantage of the tax code and "claming" profits where in some cases none exist. Think ENRON, WorldCom and the like.
 
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