Re:Biggest companies pay the least tax, shows new research
by thaumasiotes on Sunday April 05, 2020 @04:10PM
(#22788251)
> I said that it's "mostly true" that the sales tax is incident on consumers, and then you "misread" me as saying that the burden falls "entirely" on the consumer, thus creating the much higher burden of proving an elasticity of 0?
You said that.
klyrs said "sales tax is paid by the consumer". You were discussing how to interpret his comment.
> In any case, as fate would have it, the original commenter was harboring the confusion you suspected about the distinction between physically paying the tax, vs bearing its economic burden
It's difficult to see how you can say this, since he quite clearly says the opposite. He's drawing a clear distinction between physically paying the tax and being the source of the money.
> It's semantically true businesses are required to make those payments to the government, but they're coming directly out of my pocket.
In that comment, he claims that every single expense a business incurs, tax or otherwise, is paid by that business's customers. He is in fact arguing for an elasticity of 0. That claim is not correct as a matter of cost incidence. As a matter of pure cash-flow accounting, it sounds obvious, but it's actually self-contradictory -- you can repeat the analysis to show that in fact business expenses are not paid by consumers, but by the employers they work for. But he clearly understands that there's a difference between suffering from the tax, and physically transferring the money. His confusion is over the idea that, if a flat $5 surcharge is levied on Oreos, and when you buy Oreos the receipt includes a line saying "Oreo tax - $5.00", that that might be costing Nabisco anything. He says it doesn't. He is wrong.
You said that.
klyrs said "sales tax is paid by the consumer". You were discussing how to interpret his comment.
> In any case, as fate would have it, the original commenter was harboring the confusion you suspected about the distinction between physically paying the tax, vs bearing its economic burden
It's difficult to see how you can say this, since he quite clearly says the opposite. He's drawing a clear distinction between physically paying the tax and being the source of the money.
> It's semantically true businesses are required to make those payments to the government, but they're coming directly out of my pocket.
In that comment, he claims that every single expense a business incurs, tax or otherwise, is paid by that business's customers. He is in fact arguing for an elasticity of 0. That claim is not correct as a matter of cost incidence. As a matter of pure cash-flow accounting, it sounds obvious, but it's actually self-contradictory -- you can repeat the analysis to show that in fact business expenses are not paid by consumers, but by the employers they work for. But he clearly understands that there's a difference between suffering from the tax, and physically transferring the money. His confusion is over the idea that, if a flat $5 surcharge is levied on Oreos, and when you buy Oreos the receipt includes a line saying "Oreo tax - $5.00", that that might be costing Nabisco anything. He says it doesn't. He is wrong.