Why Offshore? Ask Apple!

As Apple just closed the week with a $553.74B “monster” market cap, in the same league as titans!
The company also rallied behind the idea of creating a tax holiday. same that would help repatriate more than $1 trillion held abroad in Offshore accounts. The idea is to use these funds as a cash injection into U.S. economy.
So Apple’s paying a dividend to shareholders and stock buy back, hurray! for you if you happened to pick this stock. This return of cash to the street will cost about $45 billion over three years.
Apple has made an aggressive pitch for the corporate tax holiday, stressing that it plans to keep more than $60 billion parked offshore until Congress makes it easier for companies to bring those profits home.
CFO Oppenheimer said: “We think that the current tax laws provide a considerable economic disincentive to U.S. companies that might otherwise repatriate the substantial amount of foreign cash that they have…”
Under current tax policies, companies have to pay their full corporate rate, as high as 35 percent, on profits made anywhere in the world. The corporations can defer paying those taxes until the profits are brought to the United States, and also receive credits for taxes paid to foreign governments.
But Apple — which, like several other Silicon Valley titans, has spent months lobbying for more flexibility to repatriate offshore profits — said it will rely exclusively on domestic cash reserves for the transactions and will not touch the billions in profits held abroad.
“Repatriating the cash from offshore would result in significant tax consequences under current U.S. law,” Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said on a conference call.
Under repatriation measures introduced in both chambers of Congress, multinationals could potentially pay a tax rate as low as 5.25 percent on offshore profits.
But while those proposals have supporters in both parties, the measures have powerful opponents and have yet to move far in Congress. Skeptics of the holiday point to several reports that have said a previous tax holiday, enacted in 2004, did little to stimulate job creation.
The Obama administration, which released a corporate tax reform framework last month, is among those that feel the last holiday did little to help the economy. Administration officials have for months said they are firmly opposed to a repatriation holiday, and that they would not consider the idea outside of the broader context of tax reform.
Now behind the holiday we have a list of big players such as: Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft and Google — all supporting the WIN America Campaign, lobbying efforts to urge Congress to reduce US Global Titans tax on offshore profits.
Tim Cooke, successor to “legendary innovator and bigger” than life Steve Jobs, recently expressed “…Apple has more than enough cash to do what is needed…”, so then repatriation measures seem to juxtapose this statement. Only God knows what would happen to the AAPL stock, today in the $600 avenue, if this so called “tax holiday” where to be imposed.