[diffeomorphism]

> I mean, tax rates can change over time. It seems like the goalposts have now been moved from "did they pay US tax?" to "did they pay enough US tax?".

No, that is decidedly not what we are talking about. The claim was that holding all your money away from the US does not matter because the tax will be paid eventually. As we see, no it wasn't and the tax rate was not lowered because "taxes change over time" but because otherwise companies will just not ever repatriate their money.

It is factually correct to say that apple did not pay the full US tax rate on the money they earned overseas. You are free to argue that this is fine and they at least still paid some, lower tax rate, but this is the whole topic we are talking about. Apple pays very low tax rates and the EU, Ireland and the US are arguing whether this is unfair (state aid) and should change.

[nodamage]

Perhaps you should re-read the comment I was replying to. The original claim was that Apple didn't pay US taxes at all. I simply pointed out that they did.

A temporary change in the tax rate during 2018 is, by definition, the tax rate changing over time. If a product normally sells for $50 and I wait until it's on sale for $25 to buy it, did I pay the "wrong" price? No, I paid the price the vendor set at the time of purchase.