Apple right to avoid ridiculous taxes

May 22, 2013

By John Seiler

Apple Inc. is the world’s most profitable and admired company. It’s also the world’s biggest tax dodger. Reported the Wall Street Journal of a U.S. Senate grilling of CEO Tim Cook, “The Senate panel, in a report released Monday, said that Apple used technicalities in Irish and U.S. law to pay little or no corporate taxes on $74 billion over the past four years.”

Good for Apple. No reason to get robbed more than necessary. This also explains how Apple thrives in California’s notoriously high-tax environment: they dodge paying much of the extortion.

And who has most benefited your life in recent years? Apple, with its great inventions? Or the government, with its confiscations and abuses?

But it’s a little hypocritical of Apple because its wealthy executives are part of Silicon Valley’s Democratic Party political culture. The late Steve Jobs, who devised the tax-dodging strategy, was a Democrat and friend of President Obama.

There are no studies to prove it, but I would suspect that most top Apple execs are Democrats who voted for Proposition 30, last year’s $7 billion tax increase. It supposedly taxed those who had to “pay their fair share,” as went the phrase of Gov. Jerry Brown (and of President Obama on the federal tax increases imposed by him and Republicans on Jan. 1).

But those who are supposed to “pay their fair share” are richer, smarter and better connected than the rest of us, and so can run rings around the politicians and activists who write the tax laws, and the government functionaries who implement the laws.

Here was a typical exchange at the hearing:

Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), chairman of the investigations panel, on Tuesday accused Apple of employing “alchemy” and “ghost companies” to escape tax collectors in the U.S. and Ireland, the base of the firm’s international operations outside the Americas.

“Apple has sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” said Mr. Levin. “Apple is exploiting an absurdity, one that we have not seen other companies use.”

Mr. Cook [Apple CEO] countered: “There’s no shifting going on…We pay all the taxes we owe, every single dollar.”

Levin is retiring next year after a long career of misgovernance, wasting the taxpayers’ money with a wild abandon. Levin also pressured the IRS to go on its since-revealed witch hunt of conservative and libertarian groups, although now he’s pretending to be the taxpayers’ friend against such abuse.

It’s not just him. Both Republicans and Democrats refuse to reform the confiscatory policies and socialist spending that all but mandate the IRS abuse.

Someday, we’ll repeal the demonic income tax — and replace it with nothing.