Tuesday 24 April 2012

Repatriation lobby disbands

Apple's anti-tax shill group, the WIN America Campaign, has apparently ended.   Not just Apple's, of course, but Apple has been particularly noisy on the subject.  Bloomberg reports that while it looked like the group was making headway last year, the political climate has changed:
"The repatriation campaign ran into resistance in part because the money held outside the U.S. was seen in Congress as a way to help finance an overhaul of the tax code, the lobbyist said."
I will accept that as a political/pragmatic reason why repatriation amnesty might have been killed in this instance but I still hold out hope that (1) the principle of the thing and (2) the fact of its empirically observable outright failure as a stimulus policy, might have had some sort of impact, so that it's not just a political change that keeps the U.S. from re-adopting this patently outrageous program (first seen in the 2004 JOBS Act).

WIN America's anti-tax twitter screed feed was last updated a month ago March, ending with this gem: "Apple CFO: 35% tax rate is an "economic disincentive."  We need to take down barriers, not keep them up."  Pithy.  But so self-serving as to be embarrassing.  It's pretty clear Apple's actual tax rate undoubtedly gets no where close to that figure and the company seem to be fully able to pay its taxes as a matter of cash flow.

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