Payroll taxes are always borne by the worker. They may not make the payments, but when I hire people, I set aside an all-in budget, and their salary is whatever is left after benefits and taxes. If the payroll tax goes up, it means their raise is smaller.

That's how every business works. All per employee costs are borne by the employee one way or another.

Exactly. There's no such thing as totally "free shipping" or "free returns" either. One way or another, the customer is paying for it.

This is only true in the sense that there is a cost to move goods, but it is not true in the sense that retailers charge more to move the good to you. If it were, I wouldn't be able to reliably purchase goods shipped to my door for equal or less than what I pay in physical stores. When shipping is included in the price, that means that the shipper bears the cost of shipping by taking a smaller margin. If I were to bear the cost, it would appear as an explicit cost or higher prices, neither of which are happening.

Higher cost than what?

By the same argument, customers are paying the costs for Best Buy's internal logistics and retail floor operations to enable “free browse and instant pickup”. If those costs are higher than Amazon/NewEgg's costs for "free shipping", I'd expect to see exactly the relative prices that you're seeing.

I'm sorry, but I can't track the point you are trying to make.

I'll reiterate my point that shipping is a cost that has to be paid, but who bears that cost is not necessarily the customer. If it was the case that the customer was the one bearing that cost, there would be a difference in the price you pay for goods at a physical store vs. goods shipped to your home, implicitly or explicitly. There is generally no difference, and in many cases, ship to home is cheaper because you can select from more retailers.

I think you're confusing who writes the check vs who bears the cost. The person writing the check isn't always the one bearing the cost.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. --Henry Ford

This is not evidence that payroll taxes are borne solely by the worker. I'm not claiming that workers don't bear any of the burden. Just that they don't bear all of the burden. this would be especially true in an asymmetrical payroll tax system in competitive labor markets like the Seattle Software Developer market.

I'm not sure how a competitive labor market makes any difference. They all have to pay the same payroll taxes. If anything it's a great equalizer -- all companies must bear that employee cost. So they will all take it out of their employee's earnings equally.

In this context, we are talking about the Seattle Head tax, which is NOT applied equally.

In the larger discussion of payroll taxes, to disprove that workers bear the entire burden of payroll taxes, just go through the thought experiment where we eliminate the employer side of the SS tax and whether wages would rise 6.2%. They wouldn't. Workers were willing to work for $N previously, there is no reason that they would stop working/change jobs unless they were paid $N + 6.2%.

Of course salaries wouldn't go up. Because you removed the cost from the equation.

But now do the thought experiment where the employee must explicitly pay the extra 6.2%. Now of course you have to give them a 6.2% raise, because they would demand it to cover their increased costs.

In your thought experiment the cost isn't being borne by the worker, it's being borne by the business.

No it isn't.

Numbers: I pay the worker $10000 a month. Let's say my tax cost is $500 a month, and their tax cost is $500/mo. So they get a check for $9500, they see a $500 tax deduction, and they net $9000.

My all in cost is $10000.

Now the city says "you don't have to pay your part of the tax anymore, the worker does!"

So now I pay them $10000, they see a deduction of $1000 on their paycheck, and net $9000. My all in cost is still $10000, their net is still $9000. Nothing has changed.

I'm still paying $10000 to have that worker. And if my budget is 100000, I can still only afford 10 workers.