It's the holidays, and whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or anything else, there's one thing that we all have in common.
Corporate America wants us all to buy stuff, lots of stuff.
And from a purely economic standpoint, the holiday season is a big boon for retailers and manufacturers who wait all year for their products to fly off the shelves on black Friday and the month leading up to Christmas and the New Year.
But where's all that money we spend actually ending up?
It's not going to taxes, and it's not circulating through the American economy.
No, because companies like Apple, General Electric, Boeing and Verizon don't pay much in taxes relative to their earnings, at least not here in America.
Take a look as 60 Minutes' Charlie Rose pressed Apple CEO Tim Cook on
the issue.
That last sentence from Cook is really strange, because it's technically true, but it's beside the point.
The real question isn't whether Apple "pays what it owes", the real question is whether Apple is hiding massive amounts of profit offshore so that their CPAs can calculate that Apple owes less than it really should.
As Charlie Rose pointed out, Congressional and independent probes have shown that that's exactly what Apple is doing.
And they're making a killing by doing it, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that Apple avoided paying 9 billion dollars in U.S. taxes.
SEC filings show that Apple holds over $181 billion in offshore profits, more than any other U.S. company, and they would owe roughly a third of that, about 60 billion dollars, if they tried to bring the money back into the United States.
But it's not just Apple, it's pretty much all of the biggest corporations on the Fortune 500.
