Absolutely terrible article.

In an article about property taxes paid or unpaid, it doesn't even mention property taxes. Is Apple's campus under-assessed? A little Googling shows Cupertino's tax rate as $7.96 on a thousand which would value Apple's campus at $1.16B. Is that a lot? Is that a little? What are other companies assessed at in Cupertino and surrounding cities?

The article talks about income taxes which are totally irrelevant to the situation and Woz's assertion that Apple should pay 50% income tax. The article talks about money earned offshore that Apple doesn't pay standard US income tax on, but fails to mention that pretty much every other country in the world doesn't tax foreign earned income as income earned locally (just letting it be taxed in the country it was earned). Plus, it's irrelevant to Cupertino.

This is just "you should hate on Apple. Why? Um, they're not paying taxes. What taxes aren't they paying? Um. . . the taxes."

Really, my simple Googling of Cupertino's tax rate and then trying to come up with an assessment off that isn't good journalism. But I'm just writing a comment on HN at 8am. I'm not a paid journalist - but that paid journalist hasn't researched the simplest questions possible. If Apple were replaced by hundreds of companies that added up to the same number of desks, would Cupertino get more money? If the answer is "no", then there's no story here.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employee...

The simplest Googling comes up with a much more useful article. Apple paid $25M in property tax in 2012 and that is going to grow by $32M annually with Campus 2 to over $56.5 annually. Apple is funding $66M in local public improvements and $35M on transportation demand programs. Plus, Cupertino is getting $38.1 in one-time construction fees and taxes and Apple is going to pay the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority $15.4M annually.

The caption of the image on the guardian article says the mayor wanted $100M from Apple for infrastructure - beyond the more than hundred million the VentureBeat article notes. It kind of sounds like the Mayor is incompetent, hated by voters who are trying to recall him, trying to salvage his career by running for state assembly, and trying to blame his incompetence on Apple. It seems to be more an article about how Cupertino has a terrible mayor.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple...

Here's another, much better article. It notes that Apple's original campus was 856,000 square feet and that Apple has bought (which they would pay tax on) or leased (which their landlord would pay tax on) another 2M square feet. That makes it hard to say exactly what the property should be assessed at given that we don't know what proportion of the 2M they own, but let's say half. At $500/sq ft, 1.856M square feet would come out to $928M in property value. That's pretty close to $1.16B. At the very least, it seems like Apple's taxes are in the ballpark - especially when you consider the amazing deals that companies regularly negotiate to move to locations. Tesla negotated a 100% property tax and sales tax abatement from Nevada for 10 and 20 years respectively, $12,500 for every job, 10 years of 100% business tax abatement, discounted electricity rates for 8 years, plus $120M - totaling $1.2 Billion.

Again, it sounds like an incompetent mayor that voters are trying to recall attempting to save his career.