I’m writing this on an IPad, and I love the thing, but Apple is a different story. It’s a corporation, and like Google’s should be, it’s motto could be “first, do evil”.
It seems the European Commission has found, to Tim Cook’s stunned surprise, that Apple is using Irish law to avoid paying taxes, not only here in the U.S., but to Ireland itself. Apple Made a deal with Ireland to pay a portion of its loose change to Ireland in order to escape taxation everywhere else, and will now have to pay slightly more. Cook is furious, claiming that the Commission’s insistence that it pay taxes in line with the rates Ireland charges to other tax dodgers is “total political crap“.
For reasons that are mystifying to me, the U.S. government also feels that Apple, which avoids taxes here, should also be allowed to avoid taxes in Europe.
What I find interesting is that this ruling stems from a European regulation that forbids member states from granting tax benefits on a piecemeal basis. As I understand it, they are free to adopt any tax code they want, but the laws have to apply to everyone, and they can’t dish out the kind of tax breaks that have sent the states here in the best country on earth racing to the bottom. It’s the kind of common sense regulation that would be adopted here in a minute, if we had a Congress that was not bought and paid for by the corporations. Instead we have a system that allows a state and governor that shall remain unnamed to cut school funding while giving 22 million to a billionaire to build himself a nice new headquarters. These deals do affect interstate commerce, so the federal government should have the power to step in and bar them across the board. Everyone would be better off if no one could do it, but as it is at present, everyone has to do it because if they don’t, someone else will.
Meanwhile, my heart’s bleeding for poor Tim Cook. It’s so unfair that Apple is expected to help pay, be that contribution ever so small, for the system of laws and governments that makes its existence possible.
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