Taxing them more simply means higher prices for all the customers.
Well that's simply horseshit. Paying their taxes increases their costs. Apple make a lot of profit, so paying taxes would reduce that profit. Profit is used for a lot of things; salary increases (rarely), growing the business by investing in new product designs, more staff etc etc, put in the bank for a rainy day, or paid to the shareholders in dividends or via share buy-back schemes.
Apple has stupendous amounts of past profit stashed away as cash reserves in offshore banks, because it doesn't have anything else it can think of to do with it.
Increasing prices to pay their taxes, rather than take a slightly smaller profit makes no sense, because their revenues already far outstrip costs. If a higher price would be more profitable for them (vs decreasing sales), they'd already be charging it.
Apple, like Google, Vodafone, Amazon and any number of multinationals pay hardly any tax in the countries that buy their products. They make their revenue from western countries, but use complex arrangements with shell corporations, intra-company loans, licence payments etc so that those profits are then recorded in 0-tax tiny countries. Thus much higher profits - which ultimately largely end up going to the shareholders (which of course, includes the CEO and other top management). The shareholders are largely already the wealthy, because they're the only ones able to use their money to invest in large amounts of shares instead of you know, buying stuff to live on. Even if the money doesn't go directly out in dividends, it's used to increase the share prices, which has the same effect.
So instead of paying for the infrastructure they use in western countries, for the social safety nets their workers have in europe etc, for the educations their workers get, by paying the pitiful amounts of tax rates they actually should - they divert them to offshore holdings and they end up making the already rich richer.
It's incredibly regressive. In addition, smaller national companies can't pull the same tricks, have lower profits to invest in growing their business, and is a good part of the reason the big multinationals got so big in the first place and displace smaller companies from the marketplace. Who, incidentally, also pay better wages on average.
UK corporation tax rate is 18%, hardly extortionate for the amount they benefit from selling in the UK. And hardly any of the multinationals actually pay anything like that rate, many pay nothing at all - meaning us working stiffs have to pick up the difference to pay for the NHS, roads, police, firemen, social security, pensions etc etc etc, all of which have been under heavy pressure precisely because the government isn't getting enough taxes in to pay for our already thinly stretched services.
Companies in the 50's and 60's used to include social responsibility for their workforce and their communities as part of their thinking - they knew that having customers able to afford their products was a good thing for them in the long run. Now it's all about maximising share price in the shortest possible time, and screw the long term, the workforce, the customer and anyone other than the very richest.
