Most of Apple's $82 billion cash stockpile is 'trapped' overseas

Suggest headline re-write. Change "TRAPPED" to "PROTECTED"

:)

Apple should move all operations overseas, so that their costs are incurred overseas, thus freeing up the US revenue to pay dividends with.

Wait a sec, they're already implementing that strategy!

If the current tax system is not going to be overhauled in the near future, then clearly we no longer have fair representation in Congress.

When the Constitution was ratified, we had 1 representative in the House for every 30,000 constituents, and each Senator was appointed by their respective state legislature. Can we honestly say today that we still have anywhere near that level of representation?

To have 400 people ruling over 400,000,000 is comparable to having 1 person rule over 1,000,000. I thought America didn't believe in having kings?

TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

Corporations don't pay taxes. There is either less money for the stockholders, the employees, and/or the customers have to pay higher prices. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmqoCHR14n8

As someone else said, their revenues and profits were already taxed in the appropriate jurisdictions overseas.

Here's a story from Alternet which explains how there's more to this story than meets the eye: http://www.alternet.org/economy/151140/ihate_corporate_tax_dodgers%3A_how_apple_avoids_paying_its_fair_share/

tl:dr - Apple's strategies have avoided paying their fair share of taxes, not eliminated paying them. They'd like to eliminate paying them.

Also I'm not entirely sure how a 35% tax would take out "most" of the cash. We must be using a different definition of "most" than I'm used to.

So Apple can't bring its money home because it would then have to pay its taxes? Yeah sorry, not a convincining argument. The rest of us pay our taxes. Apple can too.

"They could build a stack of dollar bills 3400 miles tall, but can't they can't do much else with it for now."

Sure they can! Havn't you heard off 'offshoring'? The US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. It makes more sense for companies to keep foriegn revenue out of the country. They can use this revenue to build plants, and hire cheap labor, and make even more foriegn revenue.

Most countries realize that high corporate tax rates result in companies investing foriegn revenue in foriegn lands - but in the US corporations, which are treated taxwise just like individuals, are 'the rich', and 'the 1%', and are therefore despised by 'the 99%', and are to be taxed at the highest rate possible.

As globalization continues, and corporations make more, and more revenue offshore, the offshoring of business, and jobs is going to continue to grow!

You want this money to come home, it should come home tax free...the income wasn't generated here but they want to bring it home to spend it in this country. You want jobs to stay here, look at the real problem...our taxes and regulations.

Keep it up and continue the current tax and regulatory policies and pretty soon there won't be any jobs left here.

It's not "trapped", It's comfy there.

The idea that the only place to design prodiucts and write code is the US, is long gone. To get those retained profits productively used in the US, is to foster a better business climate. In the meantime there are plenty of bright folks in Ireland and Belgium who would be happy working for Apple.