As has been widely reported over the past few days, Tim Cook held a nice little presentation Wednesday in which he announced that Apple would be repatriating its hoard of overseas cash now that the tax laws have been changed to give them (and every other corporation) a hefty tax break for doing so. They’ll bring back some $250 billion and pay an estimated $38 billion in taxes on it. So now we know exactly how much Apples’ first piece of the Trump tax bill really is, which is roughly $49.5 billion in taxes we’ll never get out of them now. It’s easy to see why Cook would laud the tax bill for allowing Apple to do this (they lobbied for this provision, after all), which is where this story starts to go off the rails. Because this isn’t really a diary about Cook and Apple taking advantage of the gifts that have been showered on corporations by the Trump administration and their accomplices in Congress. This is about what else Cook’s announcement contained and how it has been trumpeted (pun intended) in the media.
Cook also announced Wednesday that Apple would be making new investments in the US. He also made some rather interesting conjectures about what Apple’s overall contribution to the American economy means. While these two things are entirely different, that fact seems to have been lost on the media in general and has been specifically swept under the carpet by the right-wing media. What comes out of this process is an impression that Apple is making a huge investment in the US as a direct result of the tax bill. The truth is pretty far from either of those impressions, but that hasn’t stopped those on the right, desperate for anything that seems to show the tax bill as anything other than a national disaster.
The headlines that came out of Cook’s announcement almost uniformly had one theme: “Apple Announces $350 Billion Investment in US Economy”. That was Breitbart’s version (no link, because I will not link to them), but was virtually identical for a wide swath of “news” outlets. This wasn’t just the right-wing nutjobs either. The business press fell for this too, with CNBC, Motley Fool, The Street, and Market Watch all fielding identical headlines to Brietbart’s. Even the Washington Post has a headline that is only slightly different: “Apple pledges to spend $350 billion and bring 20,000 jobs to the U.S. within next five years” and still leaves the reader with the impression that this will be investment. It’s not until two-thirds of the way through the article that you learn this is not the case.
Of all the press outlets, the one that got the whole thing right from the beginning was actually CNET. They had a much more accurate headline: “Apple to invest $30 billion, add 20,000 jobs over next 5 years”, which is an accurate assessment of what Tim Cook actually said Apple would do with its money. So where did that $350 billion figure come from? That was from another remark by Cook that I’ll let Terry Collins at CNET explain.
Apple, which described itself as "already the largest US taxpayer," said it anticipates directly contributing about $350 billion to the total US economy over the next five years. Besides new investments, that figure includes an expected $38 billion in taxes paid on the overseas revenue brought into the US, spending with US suppliers and manufacturers, taxes on Apple employees' wages and sales tax that consumers pay on Apple products. [emphasis mine]
So that $350 billion is just what Cook and his savants at Apple think they’re going to contribute overall to the economy over five years, not what they’re going to invest now or ever. While I can understand the right-wing press getting this wrong (wishful thinking, illiteracy, and innumeracy will do that) it’s much less excusable for the business press to get this so wrong. They should presumably know the difference between an investment and a company’s overall contribution to the economy. But now we have outlet after outlet with the headline I cited from Brietbart, warping the public’s understanding and propping up the Trump tax bill with successes that don’t actually exist. We can all bet that we’ll be having to shoot down the “but Apple invested $350 billion because of the tax cut” myth for years to come, all because the press was either asleep at the wheel or complicit in spreading propaganda for Trump and his GOP cronies.