Being able to pay tax lawyers that are so great that you basically don't have to pay taxes kind of breaks the concept of taxation though.
And maybe they overtax those sausage stalls, lots of/most every? country has tax regimes with lots of insanity. Apple wouldn't be playing the games it plays with the US if we didn't have the 2nd highest or so corporate tax rate in the world (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates when you factor in state tax rates only Cameroon is perhaps higher).
While I was doing the search for that, I noted that as a region Europe has the lowest, but that's no doubt not accounting for VATs, which the US is allergic to, at least unless one of the big other categories of taxes is totally killed off (like, with a "this time we mean it" Constitutional amendment).
Anyway, my point is that all this results in all sorts of distortions. For example, when the Reagan individual tax rate cuts kicked in, I noticed my parent's business and investing strategies change as tax avoidance became much less important. In his working lifetime, the top rates went from 91% ("We Like Ike???") to 70% (which as I recall was split between 50% or more for "earned" and 70% or more for "unearned" (investment) income), to 38.5%, to 28%, before it started going up again (even the George W Bush tax rate cuts only dropped them 4.6% to 35%).
And going back to the distortions, the family exemptions allowed a normal family prior to JFK's 1964 supply side rate cuts to survive with the lowest bracket being 20%; those weren't adjusted for inflation until Reagan's reforms, which turned them into a pretty minor thing with how inflation savaged the dollar during that long period (the CPI peaked at like 13-14% around the time Reagan entered the Oval Office).
How low do you think that tax rate would have to be? Ireland's corporation tax rate is just 12.5%, but Apple didn't pay that either. They had a special deal under which their effective tax rate was as low as 0.005% to 1%. This is the deal that the EU has now ruled against under furious protests from Tim Cook personally and the US government.
So yes, if the US lowers its corporation tax rate to effectively 0% then Apple will stop playing games.
My understanding is that the numbers I quoted (in good faith) are derived from the profits Apple would have made in Europe had they not been allowed by the Irish government to use unrealistic transfer pricing.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2923_en.htm
The numbers are certainly not meaningless, but whether or not they are misleading is for a court to decide. It was certainly not my intention to mislead and I do not have all the information to come up with more reliable estimates of Apple's real profits in Europe.
Also, as someone who is liable to pay personal taxes on top of profits already taxed through corporation tax I don't feel particularly biased or inclined to score political points in favor of higher taxes.
It is simply my opinion that shifting government income from one tax to another isn't necessarily going to improve avoidance overall. It is also my opinion that taxes always have to be compared to what they buy us, in terms of actual services and also in terms of being humane.
But surely you can see that 35% is so high a rate they'll focus more on tax avoidance than is healthy for any of these parties, including themselves?
The item I saw about regions indicated Europe was at around 18%. The nickff cited 6%, 12%, 18%, all those are reasonable, as well as 0%, since the taxes they pay by definition eventually get passed on to others. Some wags had commented WRT to the Christian duty to tithe, "If 10% is good enough for God, why isn't is good enough for the Federal government?"
That they and so many other US based companies have accumulated such huge offshore pots of money is one of those distortions I go into in my rather long post you're replying to. I submit to you it wouldn't be so huge if repatriating it to the US wouldn't automatically cost them 35% of it. By policy endorsed by no less a moral authority than the US Supreme Court, it's their right, if not their duty, to avoid as much tax as they can.
I don't want to defend the US corporation tax structure, but I don't think corporation tax should be considered in isolation. Other countries have a low corporation tax and make up for it by high employer contributions to social security or other taxes.