AppleTax: It's Congress, Not Apple

Big cloud of FooFooDust arising from Congressional Slime over whether Apple pays taxes.

Of COURSE they don't.

But it was Congress that wrote the tax code, not Apple, right?

Ticker reminds us of how things actually work:

The problem with what Apple (and Google, and Cisco, and pharma, and many other firms including GE) is doing is not that they're moving things around "on paper" to legally avoid taxation.

It's that they have effectively bribed Congress and the governments in other nations to make this possible while you and I cannot do anything similar.

Never mind that corporations pay taxes not on income but on net profits; that is, economic surplus.  You, on the other hand, pay taxes on income, and in the case of Social Security and Medicare you do so from the first dollar.

You do not pay on economic surplus, you pay on gross.

(This also happens to distinguish the Fair Tax from the Flat Tax.  The Flat Tax ALSO taxes on 'the gross.'  Fair Tax taxes consumption only.  That's why Conspicuous Consumers love the Flat Tax.)