That money was never coming back otherwise. So no, you couldn't reasonably write that. You'd have to enter an alternate reality where US corporations like Apple voluntarily paid the backwards, high US global profit tax.
This doesn't quite make sense - the decision/cost to bring the money 'into the US' depends on a variety of factors.
I am not a domain expert, but the availability of cheap credit must have been a principal consideration, as well as the knowledge that a potential Republican president would offer an effective repatriation holiday.
In short, there are many conceivable situations in which it might make sense to pay such a tax - we're just not in one of those at the moment.
I won't address your last assertion, not having data, but I've read in many publications that the effective corporate tax rates in the US are far lower than rates in other countries.
> the decision/cost to bring the money 'into the US' depends on a variety of factors
No it doesn't. Apple has been lobbying aggressively for years, including during most of the Obama Administration, to change the backwards US global tax policy (the US being one of the few countries to utilize such an approach) and or to arrange a one-time repatriation holiday. They finally got what they wanted and they're repatriating the money immediately thereafter.
It depended on one thing: getting a low enough rate to make bringing the cash home modestly punishing. Apple was always clear about that, Tim Cook spelled it out in numerous interviews over several years.
Sure, and the issue wasn't whether it would happen, it was what the money would be used for. Republicans and Democrats wanted different things. The tax policy was going to change. It was just a matter of what we did with it. In this case, it was used to pay for lower taxes for corporations.
