CEO Tim Cook Decides Apple Doesn’t Have to Pay Corporate Tax Rate Because It’s “Unfair”
Here’s what Apple CEO Tim Cook had to say about it in a long interview published this weekend in the Washington Post:
We’ve said at 40 percent, we’re not going to bring it back until there’s a fair rate. There’s no debate about it. Is that legal to do or not legal to do? It is legal to do. It is the current tax law.
Oh, a fair rate? How does fuck you percent sound? You know, it's sickening enough when your average company hides its money offshore because they don't want to pay taxes, but Apple? What kind of business do you think you'd have right now if the United States government hadn't spent millions and millions of our taxpayer dollars to create and develop the internet? You think you'd be selling a lot iPhones if the internet didn't exist? How would iTunes work exactly? Would there be little iTunes store in the mall where kids could go and have a guy pluc their iPod into a bigger computer and transfer the mp3 to their device? Or maybe the stores coulf=d sell songs pre-loaded on zip drives. Or cd-roms? Maybe it would look something like this?
Libertarians in general drive me up a fucking wall, but when I heard that there was a subset known as "Silicon Valley Libertarians," my head almost exploded. These assholes wouldn't have anything had the federal government not built the electronic infrastructure their businesses rely on, but once they get rich they seriously start thinking "I don't need no stinkin government. What's the government ever done for me?" And they send their money offshore and we let them get away with it, because while they sure as hell aren't going to send their money to the IRS, they will send it to your friendly neighborhood Congressman, who will go to the wall defending the poor put-upon "job creators."
“I’m optimistic that, in 2017, there will be some sort of corporate tax reform,” he said. “The U.S. needs to invest more in infrastructure — so what would be great is if they take the tax proceeds of a corporate tax reform and invest it in infrastructure and roads and bridges and airports.”
That's right. The roads, the bridges, the airports, they're perfectly willing to hold all of that hostage until they get whatever it is they consider a "fair" tax rate. The roads their employees use to get to work, the airport where their private luxury jets take off and land (safely, thanks to government empoyees like air traffic controllers), not to mention good old fashioned shipping ports without which their products would never get from the slave camps factories in China to the US markets, they are perfectly willing to let all of those things fall further into disrepair until they get their way.
I'll agree with Cook on one thing. There definitely should be a corporate tax reform in 2017. We should start by taxing profits held in overseas shell companies, and collecting the interest on all the taxes that these assholes have evaded over the last decade. Then eliminate all the other loopholes these corporate parasites use to avoid paying any income tax. And from now on, we jail the CEOs, Presidents and CFOs of companies that engage in tax evasion. That's the kind of corporate tax reform we need in this country.
Failing that, we should look seriously at torch and pitchfork reform.
