If I declared right now that I won't be paying any taxes until the U.S. government lowers my taxes to a "fair rate", I'd almost certainly be arrested for tax evasion.
But when the
Washington Post asked Apple CEO Tim Cook about the billions that Apple has stashed in tax havens around the world, Cook declared that "We're not going to bring it back until there's a fair rate. There's no debate about it."
And nothing happened, either to Cook or to Apple.
Because when it comes to taxes, it's truer today than ever that only the little people pay.
Apparently though, that's not enough for the CEOs of multinational corporations, like Tim Cook.
He doesn't just want to avoid taxes, he wants Americans to know that Congress isn't writing the rules, Apple is.
Dave Johnson from the Campaign For America's Future wrote a great article about this at the
Huffington Post titled "CEO Of Giant Corporation Tells US Government He's the Boss of Them".
In it Johnson writes "[T]hese days huge multinational corporations are the boss of our Congress. So, CEO Cook gets away with it, and with keeping $181 billion in tax havens to dodge paying $59 billion in taxes. Cook knows he can just come out and say they are not going to pay their taxes until there is a "fair rate."
And he's right.
But Apple is by no means the only corporation doing this.
In March,
Citizens for Tax Justice reported that American Fortune 500 corporations are avoiding up to $695 billion in U.S. federal income taxes by holding $2.4 trillion of "permanently reinvested" profits offshore.
That's nearly $700 billion that America's largest corporations, corporations like Netflix, Nike, and Citigroup, are stashing in offshore tax havens.
And now Tim Cook is setting an outright un-American precedent by flagrantly declaring that Apple won't pay a dime of what's owed unless the U.S. government does what he says.
It's not that these corporations don't rely on tax dollars from the government, they use our interstates, they use our municipal water systems, our court systems protect their patents and copyrights, and their products rely on government-developed technologies like GPS.
They just don't want to pay for it.
