This is absolutely false.
Yes, I went a bit far. What I meant to say is that you hear about many of the wealthy with a tax rate just north of 15% and for the super wealthy in a good year it can approach whatever the capital gains rate is, which is currently 15%.
Quote: "Yes, there is a class war, Warren Buffett once said, and my class is winning. The IRS study of taxes paid in 2007 makes his point. The top 1% of taxpayers averaged about $138 million in income, and paid taxes at a rate of 16.6%."
http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010020718/top-1-lower-tax-rate-their-secretaries
But it takes a good year with lots of stock winnings and hedge fund fees earned for capital gains to be the majority of the rich's income. In the recession or even in a normal year, the rich didn't have such big gains and so more of their income was likely to be of the normal wages income which gets taxed at 35% for the most part for the rich.
In 2009, things evened out a bit. See the table at the bottom of the link. It has the 1% taxed at 24%. It is a much higher rate than most people, but still much below the 35% the normal income tax rate would impose.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
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Remember about 71% of outstanding shares are being held by institutions so roughly $3B will be paid out to individuals holding direct shares.
But there are at least a few folks like me.
See my signature line.
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Apple generates $10 billion of free cash flow every quarter. They just announced that they will distribute $10 billion per year and spend another $10 billion over the next 3 years on buybacks. They will still be generating a lot of cash that they can use to invest in new product development.
The free cash flow that we have seen and which is projected is AFTER their normal and already huge expenditures in product development. Remember they developed the iPhone before they started generating tons of cash and the iPad while generating tons of cash. The $10 billion in buybacks is supposed to be used for shares that will be given to employees, so there is a large amount of your employee costs right there. There really is no reason to think that Apple won't finish 2012 or 2013 with a much larger bank account than they have now even taking into account these dividends and buybacks.