What he meant to say was I ' ll let you keep more of your billions of dollars , as long as you pinky promise to assemble phones with parts sourced from around the world in the US . The thinking goes that if you bring more wage earners into the economy , you can lower corporate tax rates and still have a higher revenue than you would have originally . The reality is that the wage for factory workers in the US to assemble mass products like the iPhone would be on the lowest end of the tax bracket , meaning little or no tax revenue is actually added to the system . so you only lose money . Also , let ' s keep in mind that Apple ' s revenue is something like $ 215 BILLION dollars . Fuck giving them tax breaks , they don ' t need them . In fact , Apple has somewhere around $ 230 BILLION in cash on hand . or money that has been collected as profit and is just sitting around . Call me anticapitalist , but when you have a quarter of a trillion dollars in fucking pocket change , you don ' t get tax breaks .