Paying Taxes is a Lot Better Than Phony Corporate Courage, Apple

The official corporate position is now effectively We’ll pay what we want, and you’ll deal with it; Tim Cook himself has said Apple will only repatriate its vast billions to the U.S. if it’s at a rate he considers “fair.” Cook simultaneously claims Apple is already paying more in taxes than anyone else in the world, which as Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide puts it, “has the benefit of possibly being true and impossible to verify.” Apple’s tax schemes cannot be dismissed as merely matching the competition for reasons of corporate pragmatism. Yes, Google and Facebook engage in aggressive tax avoidance too.