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'Paying Taxes Is a Lot Better Than Phony Corporate Courage, Apple' (theintercept.com)
theodp writes: Every fall," writes The Intercept's Sam Biddle, "internet and its resident tech mumblers congregate for The Apple Event, a quasi-pagan streaming-video rite in which Tim Cook boasts of just how much money his company is making (a lot) and just how much good it's introducing to the world (this typically involves a new iPhone). This is merely annoying most years; but in 2016, when Apple is loudly, publicly denying its tax obligations around the world, it's just gross." Biddle finds Apple's use of the word 'courage' to describe the corporate ethos that pushed the company to remove the headphone plug from the newest iPhone while offering a new pair of $160 jack-free earbuds particularly irksome: "Removing a headphone jack or adding 20 headphone jacks does not require courage; engineers are very smart, but their job does not typically require much bravery. Courage is more often found in, say, running into a burning school to rescue the students and class rodent. Or, maybe, you could call courageous the act of paying the many billions you owe around the world into the system that ensures those students have all of the resources they need in order to learn and grow. Just a hint: Collaborative spreadsheet software doesn't count [introducing new real-time collaboration features, Cook called iWork a "very important tool in education"].
You are dumb. The only reason there isn't someone beating you over the head right now and stealing your laptop is because there is a non-negligible chance that they might actually get caught by the police. Your local police need to take a day off. You will find out how much your "life matters".
Domestic law-enforcement is a tiny fraction of tax expenditures. So tiny, bringing it up is a misnomer. Even public schools cost more ($620 billion ) than police in the US (under $200 billion) — and parents still need to add hundreds of dollars on top of it. Which about matches the 640 billion spent collectively on Medicare.
But schools aren't the highest expenditure either — welfare spending exceeds $1 trillion every year (that's just the Federal government spending, BTW), for example, which is 10 times the spending on police by both Federal and local governments.
Military, the usual lighting rod of Leftists, is expensive too, but those expenditures (along with law enforcement) are explicitly in the government's care according to the Constitution. Nothing else is...
To even bring up "police" in any tax-discussion is dishonest. One can always tell a Statist by it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.