Apple plans new U.S. campus, to pay $38B in foreign cash taxes
How realistic is it that a $5 billion fund can move a non-trivial amount of iPhone manufacturing to the US? Most of the BOM supply chain is in Asia, and assembly at FoxConn I heard amounts to 3% of the cost. It seems like Apple would have to build mostly automated assembly in the US or suffer severe margin reduction, and they&#x27;d suffer turnaround issues with the crucial components being still sourced in China.<p>However, given the issue with iCloud, you can see that they&#x27;ve now realized they have to reduce the leverage China has over time, but $5 billion seems way too small to move an entire logistics manufacturing chain, they need a moonshot for this. Apple spends way too much on stock buybacks and dividends and not enough on reinvestment.<p>Elsewhere in this thread, the pro-Trumpists don&#x27;t seem to get why people were opposed to the tax plan:<p>The fear many people have is that this repatriation will mostly go to stock buybacks, dividends, and executive compensation just like the last 3 times there was a repatriation event. The last repatriation event didn&#x27;t make a dent in national income growth or GDP, it barely moved the needle. The Democrats wanted the funds to be spent on infrastructure, or education as an offset.<p>The GOP decided to spend any increased revenue on lowering the estate tax and marginal tax rate cuts to avoid the cutoff for reconciliation. Since Democrats, backed by tech companies, had long supported repatriation. The GOP had a chance to pass a clean corporate tax bill that left everything else alone. Everyone knows the reductions for marginal rates at the high end and the estate tax changes aren&#x27;t going to affect GDP much, and the net result of that was to impose double taxation on some states due to SALT deduction changes, and increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion.  Apparently, double taxation is bad if it&#x27;s the estate tax, but not if you&#x27;re in California, New York, etc.<p>A practical, clean, corporate tax reform bill would have been better, especially if it was synchronized with international partners to try and close loopholes. For this reason, although the tax plan had some good aspects to it, overall, it&#x27;s a very bad bill and I doubt the positives to Apple are going to offset the negatives to the rest of the economy.