You are mixing a lot of things together and it's making it confusing for me. Dividends, income taxes are a separate matter. If you think the combined tax rate

You are mixing a lot of things together and it's making it confusing for me. Dividends, income taxes are a separate matter. If you think the combined tax rate of corporate + dividend + income taxes is too high, then you should say that directly and have the discussion be about that. This discussion has been about whether Apple is taking advantage of the tax code in order to not have to pay the 35% federal corporate tax rate. They could easily bring things back to Nevada (they do already to some extent is my understanding) and avoid the California corporate tax. So all that being separated out your argument basically strikes me as: the corporate tax rate is too high so of course Apple is going to take advantage of tax shelters in order to avoid paying it. I think this story is getting people upset because multinationals should not be free to leverage countries against one another in order to avoid paying corporate taxes. On paper Apple is a multinational corporation but both you and I know that it was American taxpayers who educated most of their employers. It was American taxpayers who provided a safe and prosperous environment for the corporation to flourish. And therefore, morally speaking, if the U.S. wants to tax Apple at a rate of 35%, then it should be able to. Unfortunately the world's tax codes have enough complexities still in them that all multinational corporations can avoid paying these taxes, while smaller corporations such as the one alluded to by the first comment in this thread do not have the capacity to avoid the taxes. This is what strikes me as against the "spirit" of the law. At the very least, multinationals should be more white-hat: sure, find and exploit complexity in the international tax code. But then you should report these things to the federal government. Maybe if there was a bounty :)