http://article.nationalreview.com/?
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February 9, 2007 6:00 AM
When You Tax Profits, You Tax People
The economics behind Hillary Clinton’s anti-business Chavezian threat.
By Larry Kudlow

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Washington economist Kevin Hassett has shown that the U.S. workforce bears a full 70 percent of the cost of corporate taxes. So, if folks are indeed worried about wage inequality, they should be lobbying their congressional representatives to cut corporate taxes in order to increase worker wages.

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Only “real” people pay taxes.

Anyone, who knows anything about business, knows that they are just conduits of costs. If I make widgets that you buy, you can rest assure that, if I am in an ongoing business, every cost associated with that widget is built into the price you are paying. If there’s an income tax, sales tax, use tax, gas tax, or a tax specifically on widgets, it’s all added into the price.

That’s what makes determining the total tax load so difficult. My widget, Hershey’s candy bar, and Mom’s apple pie from Drake’s all have taxes built into the price. You buy a my widget for a buck. How much tax did you just pay? No one knows and the thieves in Washington, Trenton, and city hall like that just fine.

That’s why taxes like the gas taxes are so insidious. They’re build into every single thing you buy. You couldn’t break that out if you wanted to.

That’s why the cost of regulations are also insidious. They can’t be broken out either. If I can only assemble my widget in Borneo because of environmental regulations, it has to be shipped to you. Now, figure out the cost of that “regulatory” tax. Good luck!

Sigh.

Then don’t forget that there is an “inflation tax”. Regardless if you think inflation is 2% or 15%, or somewhere in between (as I peg it now at about 7% based on 200 basis points over the Certificate of Depreciation rate I can get), that to is an insidious silent tax. So how much of that is in your products that you buy?

No the dead old white guys were quite right in insisting that taxes be on imports only. It’s really easy to see that. Everything else gets buried.

And, it’s not like they do anything useful with the proceeds of their theft.