Support the fact-based journalism you rely on with a donation to Marketplace today. Give Now!

What could you buy with Apple’s $14.5 billion in back taxes?

Kai Ryssdal Aug 30, 2016
HTML EMBED:
COPY
Pints of Guinness beer at the Guinness brewery on April 16, 2006 in Dublin, Ireland. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

What could you buy with Apple’s $14.5 billion in back taxes?

Kai Ryssdal Aug 30, 2016
Pints of Guinness beer at the Guinness brewery on April 16, 2006 in Dublin, Ireland. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
HTML EMBED:
COPY

One more note on Apple, Ireland and that $14.5 billion tax bill — $14.5 billion Ireland doesn’t want, it should be noted.

Thanks to our friends at Quartz, here are just some of the things that money could cover, should it ever be paid.

You could buy 2.6 billion pints of Guinness — that’s about one-and-a-half times the world supply, and about five pints for every person in the EU. You could also get 20 million iPhones from the Irish Apple store.

More substantively, $14.5 billion is also Ireland’s health care budget for the year, and 6 percent of its government debt.

Check out the full list over at Quartz.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.