Stop Taxing Businesses,

You’re Looting Their Consumers

First, a brief review for those who don’t know what happens when a business is taxed. Let’s begin with income taxes. Businesses generally have two kinds of income;

Operating income that comes from daily transactions mostly sales to customers. It is income that will be needed soon to replace the things they sell or pay for normal business expenses like wages, benefits, electricity, gas, water, and phone or computer access, etc.;

Net profit, that’s what is left over after every allowable business expense has been paid. Interest on borrowed money, travel expenses, product development, required insurances, license fees, consumer protection and warranties, all required costs and all business improvement, employee costs, product development and growth, all are expenses paid before taxes. Some net profit is used to pay back investors, called dividends; taxable to the person or company that receives them, currently a 15% tax.

The current 35% corporate tax rate in the US is among the highest in the developed world. Small businesses, usually individually owned, partnerships or special small corporations, generally pass the tax through to individuals at their regular income tax rates.

Who provides the money that pays this tax? Not the company, not their terrible bankers, not the over paid executives; they have their own personal tax problems. Not their employees, not their suppliers, not their government regulators, not the juries and courts that award lavish settlements, not their over priced attorneys, not their Senators or elected Representative.

That’s right it’s you, their customers. The ones constantly complaining about the prices while you cry out for more taxes on business, encourage more regulation and stricter laws, and mandatory consumer protections and health care increases, or higher wages and benefits, or excessive safety features, all of these costs must be passed on to and paid by the purchasers in the price of the products.

The costs of all these nice sounding but very expensive mandatory requirements must be paid by customers, even those who didn’t ask for them and don’t want them.

The companies must add these costs to the prices of all of their products. They must recover all the mandated costs through product sales, or they will have to reduce their future inventory, or lay off employees or pay them less, or stop growing; none of those are wise choices for a successful business.

If customers will not pay all required costs, there is no income to pay taxes, employees, suppliers, interest on loans, utility costs, sales tax on equipment, property tax, interstate transmission tariffs, excise taxes, fuel and highway taxes, health, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment insurance, or court settlements.

The business is broke and all its employees and customers all out of luck, and no Federal, state or local government tax revenues will be coming through or from this enterprise. No New jobs, no jobs of any kind.

Stop hiding these insidious taxes on individuals in the price of products and services, by pretending to tax businesses.

Businesses don’t pay these kinds of taxes, you do. Businesses just transfer part of your payment for their expensive products to the government along with the costs for collecting, reporting and transmitting your money to the government.

By the time consumers pay all the hidden taxes, their own income taxes, sales tax, property tax, fuel tax, excise tax, and mandatory insurances, permit fees, and licenses;

I am surprised most of us can afford to buy much of anything.

Stop taxing businesses, stop excessive regulation, stop requiring unions, stop manipulating markets with tariffs and subsidies; just stop.

You are drowning us, our children, and our grandchildren in ridiculous spending and oppressive debt.

You are bankrupting this great nation and killing its productive people. Stop it!