Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune, “It came up during Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate when CNN host John King — a self-confessed Apple aficionado — put this question to the former Senator from Pennsylvania: ‘Let’s talk about something: Apple Computer [sic] is a breathtakingly important American company. It’s one of the most respected companies in the country. I carry Apple products to do my work every day. It employs about 500,000 people … in China. It is based in the United States. Has some employees here — about 46,000 — most of them in retail stores and at the headquarters. 500,000 of them are in China. As a President of the United States, what do you do about that?'”
MacDailyNews Take: How much of an Apple aficionado can you be if you can’t even get the company’s name right on a national TV broadcast? Apple Computer, Inc. became Apple Inc. over five years ago, on January 9th 2007.
“Santorum didn’t quibble — and we won’t either — about whether Apple’s U.S. headcount is 46,000 or 60,400, or whether the kids on Foxconn’s payroll are really Apple employees,” P.E.D. reports. “Instead. the candidate launched into an answer that tied together two of 2012’s hottest issues: unemployment and taxes. This, he told King, is the signal he’d send to Apple: ‘Apple, you have all those employees over there, you make all those profits over there. If you want to bring that money back, right now you pay a 35% tax. Under our plan, if you bring it back and invest it in plant and equipment here in Charleston – you pay nothing. You put that money to work, if you invest it, you pay nothing – it’s a powerful incentive.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tax repatriation, maybe, but even more than you don’t want an $1200 iPhone (after carrier subsidy), the U.S. doesn’t want those kinds of subsistence-level (or worse) assembly jobs. Today, in a global economy, where great wage disparities exist, those type of jobs generally cost more than they are worth as they simply don’t pay enough to allow people to live independently. You want the kind of jobs Apple has already proven to have created. Read more: Apple’s real market value: How many U.S. jobs it creates.