> Wouldn't it be great if you could refuse to pay your taxes until you decided your tax rate was “fair”? If by "refuse to pay your taxes" you mean "refuse to p

> Wouldn't it be great if you could refuse to pay your taxes until you decided your tax rate was “fair”? If by "refuse to pay your taxes" you mean "refuse to pay tax on the portion of your income that you have the legal ability to not pay tax on", then yes, that is pretty great. I and many others do that on a regular basis. If the tax department wants a company to pay more tax, it has two options: 1. legally require them to, 2. convince them that there is some other reason to. A great way to achieve option 2 is to threaten them with option 1. Right now there's an extended negotiation happening between Apple (and friends) and the government, where both parties sure would like to avoid a whole bunch of new onerous legislation, and it would appear Tim Cook is describing the situation under which Apple would be willing to come to terms. If there's no deal I'm sure the resulting new laws will be a huge nightmare for everyone involved, so both parties have an incentive to negotiate pretty hard without actually backing away from the table. It's an interesting look at what happens when you're a big enough company to negotiate with the government. Not sure what all the bleating in this article is about though. You pay the tax you have to pay and no more. Has the author ever filed a tax return? Does he pay more than his required amount of tax out of a sense of patriotic duty? If not, I find this framing pretty deceptive. Nobody's giving gifts to the tax department.