Why would Apple, or any company want to pay US taxes on sales overseas, especially when they already paid income tax, property tax, VAT tax, and every other necessary tax in each jurisdiction where they did business?
Should they also pay US Social Security and employment insurance on their foreign workers in foreign countries?
If you want to look at the foreign country equivalents of these SEC filings, they're all public, and you can look through them. When you do, you'll find Apple pays north of 20% of worldwide income, when totaled worldwide. I've been through their biggest several markets looking through financial data. It's all there for you to check.
You're just making my point - Apple paid all necessary US tax, and it's quite a significant rate (just like US law) compared to US profits. They also paid all required foreign taxes, also at a pretty high rate.
Also, if you think somehow Harry Potter accounting implies Apple accounting, then if I point to a company paying the amount of taxes you like, is that evidence Apple did too? Of course not. It's an invalid comparison or implication in either case.
Same for your made up $100 and $110 story. What if I make up the same story with $100 made and $110 paid in taxes - does that imply Apple paid more in taxes than they made? Of course not.
>That is after all the accounting magic.
What SEC number do you dispute, say for 2017: US sales of 229B, operating income of 61B, or 15B in taxes? These are all well documented, quite reasonable numbers. If they're lying on these, there are significant costs for them if caught. And there's thousands to millions of investors that also care a lot about how accurately Apple records numbers. It makes much more sense these are the legally correct tax numbers.
I presented you Apple's legal filings to cut through all this opinion piece nonsense, since for every opinion piece one way there's one the other way.
The truth in the matter are the legal filings: IRS and SEC. And they're pretty clear Apple pays more tax than the pop believer thinks.
If you want to argue Apple doesn't pay the proper taxes on US income, show me a SEC or IRS filing that shows it.
So you can believe opinion pieces that match your current beliefs. or you can look at the legal filings with the actual data, usually left out of opinion pieces. One will give you a much better and more accurate worldview. One is mostly designed to create outrage and pageviews - the more pageviews the more the opinion piece place gets paid.
Otherwise they, like you and pretty much every entity, pays the tax their required to be law. And like you, and pretty much every entity, they do their best to not pay more than the required amount.