We clearly have different definitions of the word loophole. They are moving profits around "creatively" in order to pay less than the corporate tax rate. Why should the U.S. have to give a repatriation discount when they have already paid a much lower effective tax rate than many other corporations?

There is no "repatriation discount". It's tax deferral just like a 401k or not selling profitable stocks at the end of a year. And Apple pays higher tax rates than most multinational corporations.

Apple can't return their foreign profits into the US or they lose this deferral, so where should they keep those profits until they do? Germany? France? Why on earth would you keep your money in higher tax countries? Why wouldn't you keep it in Ireland or the Channel Islands instead? It's not illegal, it's not even unethical.

It would be the height of stupidity to leave those profits in a high tax country. And the taxes they save are relatively minor overall. It works like this.

Apple earns about two thirds of it's profits in foreign countries. Over the last decade or so that's been around $225 Billion. They've paid about $25B in income taxes on those amounts (we'll ignore the huge amounts of VAT and employee taxes they've paid), so there is about $200B left.

If they brought it all back to the US, they'd owe the state of CA around $20B in taxes, and the Federal government around $63B in taxes. If they paid the $117B remaining as dividends, their shareholders would pay over $20B more in state and federal dividend taxes.

Let's recap. They made $225B, bringing it all back would mean mean various governments would get $128B in taxes, and the owners of the company $97B, a tax rate of over 60%.

So instead they keep the $200B in the lowest tax rate location possible while they wait for a US repatriation holiday with lower tax rates. They might earn 5% on that money, or $10B a year. If they kept it in a high rate european country, they might pay another $2B a year in taxes on the interest, but instead they got a deal from Ireland where they paid less than 1%. So they save $2B a year, but they will eventually pay nearly $100B more in taxes when they repatriate it. That's trivial in the grand scheme.

And that was a screaming deal for Ireland, because they didn't have to pay anyones unemployment benefits, or build any roads, or give Apple any "incentives" to build something. Ireland just let them make huge bank deposits in Irish banks, which turned around and lent the money out again, mostly to Irish companies, which created a massive amount of jobs and more taxes.

Not only is Apple doing nothing wrong, but they are doing a great deal of good too.

You are mixing a lot of things together and it's making it confusing for me.

Dividends, income taxes are a separate matter. If you think the combined tax rate of corporate + dividend + income taxes is too high, then you should say that directly and have the discussion be about that.

This discussion has been about whether Apple is taking advantage of the tax code in order to not have to pay the 35% federal corporate tax rate. They could easily bring things back to Nevada (they do already to some extent is my understanding) and avoid the California corporate tax.

So all that being separated out your argument basically strikes me as: the corporate tax rate is too high so of course Apple is going to take advantage of tax shelters in order to avoid paying it.

I think this story is getting people upset because multinationals should not be free to leverage countries against one another in order to avoid paying corporate taxes. On paper Apple is a multinational corporation but both you and I know that it was American taxpayers who educated most of their employers. It was American taxpayers who provided a safe and prosperous environment for the corporation to flourish. And therefore, morally speaking, if the U.S. wants to tax Apple at a rate of 35%, then it should be able to. Unfortunately the world's tax codes have enough complexities still in them that all multinational corporations can avoid paying these taxes, while smaller corporations such as the one alluded to by the first comment in this thread do not have the capacity to avoid the taxes. This is what strikes me as against the "spirit" of the law. At the very least, multinationals should be more white-hat: sure, find and exploit complexity in the international tax code. But then you should report these things to the federal government. Maybe if there was a bounty :)