Apple could get a staggering $47 billion windfall from the tax bill

Richard Waters and Tom Braithwaite at the Financial Times ran the numbers yesterday and found that the Republican tax plan’s largest single winner is going to be Apple, which stands to reap a windfall of about $47 billion. For a sense of scale, that would cover four years’ worth of the federal tab for the Children’s Health Insurance Program which provides coverage to 9 million kids but is currently on hiatus since congressional Republicans say they can’t find the money.

What’s particularly striking about this windfall is that though Apple has been a fierce advocate for corporate tax reform — $47 billion is a lot of money after all — Apple CEO Tim Cook has explained over and over again that shoveling billions into his corporate treasury won’t boost his investment spending.

He already has plenty of cash, but beyond that, when Cook wants Apple to invest more, he borrows the money. Here he was in the spring laying the situation out [emphasis added]:

I actually think comprehensive tax reform is so important to this economy. If you think about it, what many, many companies now sell globally. If you sell globally, you earn money globally. If you earn money globally, you don’t — you can’t bring it back into the United States unless you pay 35 percent plus your state tax. And you look at this and you go, “This is kind of bizarre.” You want people to use this money in the United States to invest more. We are in a good position, but an unusual one. Our good position is we can borrow. And so to invest in the United States, we have to borrow. This doesn’t make sense on a broad basis, and so I think the administration you saw that they’re really getting this, and want to bring this back. And I hope that that comes to pass.

In other words, Apple doesn’t really need any cash on hand to make investments.

Interest rates are low these days, and interest payments are tax deductible — and Apple keeps a lot of its balance sheet cash on the books of subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens. Apple’s cash-management game is to bide its time until it gets a tax windfall (i.e., soon, if Republicans get their way) and then kick the windfall out to shareholders in the form of dividends or buybacks. It’s an important part of their overall corporate strategy, but it has nothing to do with investment.

The only thing Cook gets wrong is when he says Apple is in an “unusual” position in that regard. For all the same reasons that Apple doesn’t need extra cash to finance investment, no other company does either. Indeed, Apple’s own balance sheet “cash” consists largely of bonds — money that is loaned out and contributes to the low interest rate environment in which it’s easy for companies to raise money for investment.