I’d say people are missing the important question about the Treasury Bills. T-Bills are cash instruments, and as has been noted above the current yields are less than inflation. So why the the hey is Apple choosing sit on a giant pile of cash instead of investing it and making money?
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If it gets to that point, we’re all screwed anyway; self-sufficient agriculture ain’t much use when the climate is blown and the rule of law is history.
I’ll be spending my time hunting down the fuckers who got us into the mess.
Productive? No. Satisfying? Yes.
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In that case I feel much better about it. I’d figured they were buying T-bills to clean the money, then selling them off in order to bring the money back onshore.
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With so few days left in 2016, the Headline Hyperbole Olympics one man race to the bottom is really heating up!
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Shut up! It’s not Orwellian. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t say that. Maybe you’re too liberal to read properly.
A slight exaggeration; given that Apple has so much money funding government debt, it would be easy to have both.
Companies like Apple seem increasingly to be trying to reduce costs by spending less on R&D, not more, which is why Chinese companies are coming up with new ideas faster than Apple. But the Eisenhower administration looks like a socialist paradise by modern standards.
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Yes, the humor was in the hyperbole. I meant only to illustrate that most people will read about their favorite merchant’s malfeasance, make concerned noises, and then go right on buying from them.
As for Apple, I can’t see how offshoring billions in corporate profits to a tax haven isn’t shady, but it isn’t against the law and blaming the company for taking legal advantage of the US’s fucked-up tax code is just dumb. But certain Boing Boing contributors, who’s insightful views on many things like infosec and bananas are beyond reproach, clearly don’t understand how economics works and appear to have a bone to pick with Apple. C’est la vie.
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That was hyperbole, right?
My concern is that the Western tax and banking system is actually encouraging companies to behave in a way which is not beneficial to their hosts, but is also in the long term not beneficial to them. I think Apple may have reached this point. What’s more, I suspect that the top people in Apple know perfectly well they have reached this point but are constrained by shareholders.
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Poe’s envelope has been mailed.
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He seems to understand it to me, but then I know considerably less about infosec than I do about economics.
I’m not sure I’m parsing this correctly, but it absolutely encourages companies to behave in a way that’s not beneficial to collecting tax revenue. That’s a consequence of the banking and corporate tax lobbies. When you say hosts, do you mean the countries where they actually operate the bulk of their enterprises or the countries where they incorporate investment subsidiaries to avoid taxes?
Both.
…
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The envelope for discussion has been pushed so far and is now so freakishly distorted as to be no longer based in reality.
The latter. 
Ah, then I agree.
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It shouldn’t be a surprise since most people’s way of understanding the world is mediated through for-profit corporations, with little ability, time, or motivation to seek out alternative modes of informing oneself.
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There, for once, we agree!
I think we agree quite a lot, but my tendency to go slightly nuclear gets in the way sometimes.
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Mine or yours? 
I’m a hothead too.
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I was quoting Mark Blyth talk from memory, so I stand corrected.
But the key point is that it has gone down from around 30% in the 50s to approx 10% now (as a share of federal revenue)
From this paper decline of corporate income tax revenues
The share that corporate tax revenues comprise of total federal tax revenues also has collapsed, falling from an average of 28 percent of federal revenues in the 1950s and 21 percent in the 1960s to an average of about 10 percent since the 1980s.
What this means is that the shortfall in tax revenues has been passed on to the rest of us.
Here is the Mark Blyth interview, and he mentions this elsewhere that in th 70’s across the OECD corporations paid 20% of total taxes today they pay 2% at appr 3;44 but worth watching the whole interview
So I don’t know specifically where Mark gets the stat but I think he is fairly informed on the subject.
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