[the_real_bto]

You make a very fair argument. The real question is, how do we decide what is fair for each of us to pay?

Companies playing legal games around taxes is exactly the behavior that the complicated tax code incentivizes. Play games, get money. Are corporations not supposed to play? It's parallel to programming productivity measurements. If a company starts counting LOC and rewarding it, they are going to get precisely what they asked for: More lines of code.