We've said it before and we'll say it again: your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff is clueless when it comes to matters of high finance and the finer points of modern capitalism in action. For example, we don't really know how the stock market works, but we like to watch the pretty red and green numbers go up and down. When big companies like Apple issue their quarterly earnings reports, our eyes tend to glaze over at the details and we just listen for the bottom line. But then there's taxes. While we don't know all that much about taxes, we do know that we pay them. A lot. Every week we see vast chunks of our hard-earned wages get funneled away by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and some FICA guy, after which it is theoretically transformed into those goods and services on which we all come to depend, like military bands and really high-quality hammers.

Now, far from complaining about having to pay taxes, we do in fact generally subscribe to the rather naïve view that it's the patriotic duty of every wage-earning individual and corporation to pay his, her, or its fair share. The definition of "fair" is up for debate, of course, and how those taxes are actually spent is a whole different story. But in any case, one would expect that, say, the biggest corporations in the country who are making gazillions of dollars by plying their trade in this free market paradise of a nation would be responsible for throwing a pretty hefty wad of cash into the tax pool, right? At least, that's what we would have thought, in our own lovable fresh-off-the-turnip-trunk way of looking at these things.

Imagine our shock, then, when faithful viewer Eric Wright notified us that two of the biggest names in the new economy, Microsoft and Cisco, actually managed to avoid paying any federal taxes at all last year. That's right; AtAT paid more to Uncle Sam than Microsoft and Cisco combined. Heck, in all probability, so did the guy at the 7-Eleven who rang up our last Slurpees. See, according to CNET, "corporations are allowed to deduct the gains of their workers' stock options because the profits are regarded as employee compensation, just like regular wages." Since both companies did so well on Wall Street last year, they actually managed to wipe out their entire tax bills simply by virtue of having a high stock price.

Maybe it's just us, but that hardly seems fair-- partially because Microsoft, in particular, was found guilty of antitrust violations, meaning that it made much of that money illegally, and yet because of its ill-gotten success, unlike the rest of us, the company doesn't even have to pay a dime towards keeping the lights on in the very Justice Department who prosecuted it. Given how well AAPL had been doing for the past couple of years, we wonder just how much Apple wound up paying in taxes. (Well, we don't wonder enough to bother finding out.) It's probably time for AtAT to incorporate, IPO, and get in on this happy little tax dodge. Or maybe we should just found the tax-free Church of AtAT. Who's in?