It's actually how corporations work in nearly all developed nations today (with a few exceptions such as France and Japan).

Sweden has a 20% corporate income tax rate. Finland is at 22%. Denmark is at 24.5%. The UK is at 17.5%. The average rate in Europe is 18%, in Asia it's 20%.

Further to this, corporations are (composed of) people[1]. Apple is paying out dividends this quarter and the shareholders will pay taxes on those dividends. Corporate taxes are an expense to a company that leaves them less money to spend on other expenses, including R&D, hiring, lowering prices, and competing for labor.

[1] The “composed of” was obviously what Romney meant in the 2012 campaign, not an obscure argument about corporate personhood.

Nothing was ever preventing Apple from bringing back that cash but greed. While it's good that they're finally going to pay some taxes this one time, no one should be ecstatic about this. They're just going to keep doing the same thing they were doing until they get another tax cut. Meanwhile, education, roads, civil services, all of the things that enable Apple to be as successful as they are, will languish because Apple and apologists don't believe they should help out.

Apple never said they were bringing that cash back. They still have never said that. I've read every PR piece they've put out about this, and everything Cook has said about it - not once have they said they're bringing that pile of cash back.

They said they would invest $N hundred billion in the US over N years. That almost entirely consists of payments to US suppliers / manufacturers, which comes out of operational cash flow; along with employee base expansion.

Who knows how much of the cash they'll repatriate, or when. They might not have even decided on that yet, the ink is still fresh on the tax changes.

Why? I would think that the idea of the company pushing its tax burden onto its employees is the one that should be under scrutiny.

Companies are persons (legally). Persons pay taxes (legally). Seems pretty reasonable in my book, all the complex legalize aside.