What is more important, getting the rich to pay MORE taxes in order to balance the budget, or, change the tax code and bring back some of those foreign profits made by American corporations.  From ibtimes.com's Angelo Young comes the following startling numbers.

For example:  the Jedi master of avoiding U.S. taxation, General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), increased its tax-free cash accumulation to $108 billion, up from an estimated $94 billion in 2010. Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq:MSFT) increased its stockpile to $61 billion, up 36 percent from 2011 and up from $30 billion in 2010. Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL) raised its ante to $40 billion, up 73 percent from 2011.

Sixty of the country’s largest nonfinancial corporations kept $166 billion in cash outside of the U.S. last year, shielding more than 40 percent of their profits from taxes, according to a report in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. And that’s from total overseas earnings of $1.3 trillion, up 15 percent from 2011.

A separate analysis of 83 of the largest nonfinancial corporations found that companies increased by $183 billion their foreign-based cash accumulations, representing a 14.4 percent rise from 2011, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft, Apple and Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) together hold $134.5 billion in cash abroad.  

“The corporate system is broken and it’s broken primarily because of international,” Edward Kleinbard, a tax law professor at the University of Southern California, told Bloomberg.

So the President seems to have his priorities mixed up in my opinion.  

What is your opinion?