The latest National Review takes a bite out of the recent congressional hearings targeting Apple.
One Tuesday in mid May, federal lawmakers hauled in America’s most successful corporation to investigate why it had so precisely followed the law. Apple, which paid about $6 billion in corporate-income taxes in 2012, was summoned to account for its practice of locating subsidiaries and activities abroad in low-tax jurisdictions. It is indeed a problem that U.S. corporations shift much of their income elsewhere and leave it there. But corporations do this because Congress has encouraged them to. The U.S. taxes all income earned by its corporations worldwide, but collects these taxes only when corporations bring their profits home, and at the highest rate in the industrialized world: 35 percent. Congress should not be surprised, therefore, that Apple goes to great lengths to earn its income elsewhere.
