Apple Corps, the most profitable technology company in the world and the maker of the iPhone and other such beloved gadgets, manipulated the United States tax system in order to avoid paying billions of dollars to the federal government in 2012.

Although Apple stashed over $ 100 billion in overseas accounts in order to avoid paying taxes, the company presumably broke no laws. However, its actions are wrong and unfair and point to a tax system that favors the wealthiest in society, who can afford the resources to circumvent the law.

In 2012, corporate tax revenues shrunk to $ 242 billion, while “personal income taxes and payroll taxes raised $1.9 trillion,” according to the New York Times. Apple’s tax avoidence llustrates how “Washington has leaned more heavily on individuals to pay for government.”

When students like us graduate and start paying significantly more taxes, we will be shouldering most of the nation’s financial burden, while companies valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars, such as Apple, will continue to pay relatively nothing at all.

Apple, of course, is as unapologetic as ever and denies both culpability and shirking fiscal responsibility for its participation in our nation’s social contract — even going so far as to suggest it is a victim of an outdated tax system.

Indeed, many in the business world believe that corporations should pay no taxes whatsoever and that taxes on personal income alone should fill government coffers.

But to quote the New York Times editorial board: “That is absurd.  It would leave the nation chronically short of revenue and increasingly reliant on working people to shoulder the tax burden.”

The globalization of corporations has made taxation laws difficult to create and even harder to regulate, tax rules must be tightened to insure that companies with huge profits pay back into the societal infrastructure that helped them achieve great success.

For example, Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak attended De Anza from 1969 to 1974, who utilized a publicly funded institution.

Wouldn’t it make sense for Apple to “pay it forward” so that the next Wozniak or Jobs have opportunities to enrich his or her life through our public education system?

“I just don’t understand it,” De Anza president Brian Murphy told the New York Times last year. “I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza.  Their kids swim in our pool.  Their cousins take classes here.  They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake.

“But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible.”