[alfl23]

Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed organisation like the US government when most of it goes to paying interest to the lovely central banks folks and the public has almost 0 transparency over its expenditure? The perfect portrayal of profound inefficiency and over-bloated corporate structure.

It's fun and easy to point fingers, and while tax avoidance should by no means by encouraged, why is 35% of your money the direct property of a government who does superb things like conjure into existence some of the most criminal oligopolies in the medical industry?

Maybe demand Apple to build the infrastructure themselves at their own expense, and let them manage it, seems they can actually get things done.

Uncle Sam's virtues seem to end with insane taxation used to bomb other countries and slowly but surely kill its citizens through rudimentary medical care bills in the hundreds of thousands, maybe leave real work to other people, who don't spend 600 mil of taxpayer dollar on a website.

[krisdol]

Apple has yet to provide me with food stamps or public housing, both of which saved me when I was a refugee. I can check with my spouse but I'm pretty sure the public hospital she works at was not an apple product.

The rest is just ridiculous. If you want an effective government, you have to take privatization out of it, not rely on it as we have.

[adventured]

Apple paid $46 billion in just income taxes over the last three fiscal years. The majority of that was likely in the US market, where they're more heavily taxed and have a very large market share.

I don't know where you live, but if it's in the US, then you're wrong: they did in fact help pay for food stamps and public housing.

Last fiscal year, Apple generated $72.5 billion in income before income taxes, and paid $19.1 billion in income taxes ($53.3b in net income). That's a 26.3% rate. That rate is higher than corporations pay in almost any other developed nation (Europe typically has the lowest corporate income tax rates for example), and that's after they go out of their way to try to avoid paying taxes. That $19 billion in taxes pays for a lot of welfare state benefits.

[NLips]

The parent's point is precisely that: The welfare is paid by the government, with money that it takes in taxes from e.g. corporations.

[dragontamer]

> Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed organisation like the US government

This is the municipal government complaining. Municipal governments are in charge of education, local police, and water supply... to name a few things.

The federal government barely does much at the local level. The USA is a very decentralized system.

So how about you at least complain about the right thing? If Cupertino's municipal police forces were locking people up unnecessarily or were an ineffective municipal government, that'd actually be relevant to the topic. But methinks you're just ranting about unrelated subjects.