The point about Apple hiring best graduates who got their education mostly free of charge cause of all the tax payers really shift my mind about the whole tax-avoidance thing.
Obviously there is some effect from Apple being an employer in increasing the overall employment rate, but there's a reason Apple needs local employees to hawk it's products. If they weren't employing and selling locally, some other company would be employing those people and taking Apple's market share.
I actually think the idea of a moral burden could reasonably be extended to entities such as corporations, but let's put that to the side for now.
At some point in the process a decision was made - collectively, by people - to avoid paying the stipulated rate of tax in countries in which Apple had profited. These people benefit from the educational system in those countries, but they also reap rewards from tax avoidance. The moral burden lies somewhere. Tim Cook would have known about this decision if not played a role in it, in contrast to previous statements he has made. That is the hypocrisy highlighted in this article.
Do you have a child? Do you not deduct that child in your taxes? What about a mortgage? Donations to charity? Etc. etc.
> Individuals try to minimize their taxes.
This is an oversimplification. For example, I might vote for a party that would raise my own taxes, and happily pay those taxes if I thought good use was being made of them.
As long as Citizen's United is a thing, the companies have a moral burden to go along with their supposed freedoms of speech.
A company is a collection of individuals and in the case of a public corporation, shareholders. Are not all of these participants paying their fair share of taxes?
The employees pay income tax, the shareholders should be paying taxes on dividends or capital transactions or what not.
Basically the implication is that we should tax people more when they act as part of a productive collective (corporation), which to me seems counterintuitive.
I don't see it as double taxing.
The money the company makes and the money the people make are two different streams of income and capital.
You are not taxing the people twice. You are taxing them once and the company once. A company is an entity in itself and it has a cash-flow, revenues, profits, expenditures and savings all of its own, separate to the people it employs.
It also uses up land in entirely separate way to the people it employs.
Yes, that's true, but another angle is, that when the corporation profits are very high, let's say $40B yearly, then at 20% profit tax they should pay $5B. And that looks like a too high, government didn't spend nearly that much on providing stuff to Apple, per year (it's like $500K per one employee per year, if the company has 10K employes, for example).