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Congress is so dumb. Here's how it works.

Step 1) Design a tax code that caters to special and corporate interests so complicated and burdensome that even small companies need attorneys and accountants to interpret it.

Step 2) Call a company to the carpet for taking advantage of the very tax code they designed.

Step 3) Run around, beat chest about cracking down on tax cheats and describe how appalling this is.

They lost me with that whole steroid thing. Idiots.

If Congress wants to crack down on an industry that takes advantage of the tax code, Exxon Mobile, et al would be a good start.

I don't know what's going on, but it cracks me up if I understand correctly that apple is borrowing money and paying interest and getting a tax break instead of simply bringing its wealth back to the US and paying taxes on it. Wacky.

OTOH, it would be cool if Apple felt a responsibility to support the infrastructure of a country that literally waits in line to exchange a lot of money for their goods. They are the self-declared Ghandis, MLKs and Einsteins of the technology world, perhaps they can come up with a better way to promote and propel change than by exploiting loopholes and (this is a very debatable argument) ducking responsibility.

MrSaigon wrote:perhaps they can come up with a better way to promote and propel change than by exploiting loopholes and (this is a very debatable argument) ducking responsibility.

Please.

In this new utopia, can those that are taxed too much opt out from paying them?

MrSaigon wrote:OTOH, it would be cool if Apple felt a responsibility to support the infrastructure of a country that literally waits in line to exchange a lot of money for their goods. They are the self-declared Ghandis, MLKs and Einsteins of the technology world, perhaps they can come up with a better way to promote and propel change than by exploiting loopholes and (this is a very debatable argument) ducking responsibility.

While I agree with your complaints about the use of those individuals, that's an ad campaign that began during in 1997 and ended over ten years ago. Apple was a different company in a very different position. The campaign began before the iMac came out. Apple had the graphic design market (hence the campaign appealing to liberal and entertainment figureheads) and that was about it. They'd been pronounced dead several times and had many recent failures and were the butt of jokes amongst Windows users. It was as much a self-congratulatory pep talk as anything else.

I was done with Apple the moment Steve Jobs took back over and cut all charitable donations... other than partnering with Bono to charge more for a branded iPod where only part of the extra money they charged went to Bono's charity which is basically a scam designed to inflate his ego. But my problems with these 'charities' that only exist to 'promote awareness' belongs somewhere else.

It also kills me that they were one of the ones crying about Microsoft and IE but now they have their iOS which is completely locked down and actively tries to make sure that apps which compete with something they already have an app for (or plan on having) never make it to the App Store.

Basically my point is that Apple is out for nothing other than pure profit and could care less about anything else. They can do that if they want but I won't spend my money on any of their products. Oddly enough this tax situation doesn't make me dislike their practices any more than I have before and I don't necessarily have a problem with them exploiting the loopholes that are out there. I would certainly exploit any that I could when it comes to my own money and the vast majority of those than can do.