I call for a moratorium on journalists quoting taxes either only on a single year basis or singling out only a particular type of tax to focus on.<p>The proper way to understand the tax burden of a company is to look at the number analysts use: effective tax rate, averaged over some substantial period of time. This is not a complicated number. You basically take 100% - (income after all taxes) / (income before all taxes)<p>Apple's effective tax rate, according to their 10-K filings, has been 25-30% for the last 3 years: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/18/apples-9-8-tax-rate-entirely-mind-gargling-nonsense/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/18/apples-9-...</a><p>I should note that there is, somewhat ironically, a wild inaccuracy in this Forbes article which I don't want to seem like I'm endorsing: "We might ponder upon the way that federal taxation as a share of the entire economy has grown hugely over this period as well, meaning that what you can extract from corporations has fallen not because corporations are taxed any less but because others are taxed much more."<p>Total federal taxes as a %-age of GDP have fluctuated between 15-20% for the last 50 years. It was as high as 19% as early as 1952, and hasn't been as low as it is now (15%) since 1950. There is a mythology that the federal government keeps getting bigger, but almost all the growth in the federal government came in the 10 year period between 1934 and 1944. This growth can be explained almost entirely by just three things introduced in this era: social security, medicare/medicaid, and a huge peacetime military.<p>See: <a href="http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205" rel="nofollow">http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...</a>