Two and a Half Percent

Awais and I were discussing Microsoft's annual revenue, which is apparently around $39 billion dollars. And, of course, they don't make physical products, unless you count the paper manuals, so their COGS is probably somewhere well south of $1B, leaving the greater part of that as play money.

We were curious as to how that compared to the Federal budget, so we looked it up. The (estimated) tax revenue from 2004 was $1,365B. Or, in other words, the money MS made was approximately 2.8% of the Federal revenue (not the budget, of course, because the U.S. spent $1,847B that year. Microsoft revenue was a mere 2.1% of that number).

Awais pointed out we would be better off simply levying an additional 2% tax on each citizen and having Microsoft give away their software for free.