Can we ever reconcile accounting and economics? With its excess cash reserves, if Apple paid tax, absolutely nothing about its business would change.
The more profound perspective is, who is really the tax collector then? Who is playing that economic role? Obviously these giant tax-evading companies. They are accumulating huge stockpiles of cash they cannot spend, a long-running surplus, they can't even effectively give it back to shareholders, and it's not because of tax policy. It's because they are the tax.
That's not controversial, some people call it simply rent seeking, but Summers should be going a few steps further: can we characterize the exact amount of non-tax compulsory payments (NTCPs) we are giving to Apple? Is there a policy process to convert the beneficiary of NTCPs from private ownership to the public, i.e. make it just a plain old tax?