“But the rotating flagellum is just to complex to have evolved! It’s bloddy obvious!”

Eric: companies don’t decide at what price they sell, like eyesay tries to explain and which you don’t respond to (“How quaint” is not a response). You also feign to ignore the massive amounts of profits reserves in the chain that can very well bear at least certain targeted taxes, at least provided there is a political context for it.

That taxes put pressure on costs: yes, that’s true, in the manner you show it does to an extent.
That this is transferred automatically to consumers, no, that’s not true, as eyesay shows.
That taxes actually come out of profits, not costs or revenues, is something you prefer to ignore.
That most companies manage their analytics and cost distribution above the EBITA line is also true, and that’s the limit of your demonstration.

Generally, though, as you so-called libertarians (because of course invading and occupying by force another country that you want to appropriate resources from, at the cost of hundred of thousands of lives, is so true to the libertarian ethos, isn’t it?) always decide to ignore, are the actual, real, wealth-creating and justice-creating aspects of taxes. You don’t ignore them because your so-called economic science bears you out, you do so on ideological grounds, because John Galt told you so. You just believe in a self-contained system of explaining the whole world, which has very tenuous links to empirical information. In other words, religion.

None of us has a system for explaining the way the world works that is actually predictive. There is empirical data, there are some sort of rules that we can infer, but, mostly, things happen that are not modeled like that. Things happen because people want them to happen for all kinds of reasons.

Bush didn’t cut taxes and increase security spending because science says it’s the right thing to do or he is a libertarian. He did it because his posse is rich and doesn’t like taxes, and because his posse digs oil and power.

Richard Aubrey, the profit margin cannot be determined from what I supplied in my example. I postulated an upward sloping supply curve. I didn’t specify what it cost to produce the first widget. In my example, some widgets could be made for less than $23 each, and additional widgets beyond some point could be made for between $23 and $25, and beyond that point, widgets could be made for more than $25 each. An upward-sloping supply curve is typical of many industries, although not of microchip manufacturing, where the first one costs a lot and each additional costs very little. You are right that for simplicity’s sake, I assumed no middleman. Relaxing that assumption would not change the fact that if demand is highly elastic and supply is highly inelastic, most of the costs of a tax on producers will be borne by the producers.

But you did a good job of it.

I didn’t bother, because nobody of any interest is going to be fooled by eyesay’s attempt to obfuscate the obvious.

Here, I’ll try my best:

When a company has an expense foisted upon it the company distributes the expense along its products for the sake of analyzing revenues and expenditures. When this happens the point where marginal costs equal marginal revenues rises so companies companies have to raise prices or otherwise lower costs by laying off workers or reducing supply, all of which would have a similar monetary effect on the country, you can’t impose arbitrary taxes without some negative effect on the economy.

As to your assumptions: unlimited demand, how quaint, but this is real world effects not arbitrary theoretical ideas.

Regardless of the state of the widget market companies have to make up for the expense somehow and in this world where economic decisions in China affect the fortunes of millions in America to assume that a tax increase will have no effect on consumers is ludicrous.

eyesay: Here’s a mathematical example, deliberately contrived just to illustrate the point.

You are correct so far as the mathematical model goes. But we have two problems.

1. In not clear that in real life, you could ever get the required elasticities so that the consumer doesn’t pay most of tax.

2. Those demand and supply curves pretty much only exist inside economists heads. Have you ever seen real curves derived from actual data? Every economic textbook I have ever seen present the curves as artists conceptions.

John Moore: Would one of the lawyers here furnish me whatever phrase you guys use when it is not necessary to cite the bloody obvious?

Judical Notice.

eyesay:

John Moore: “bloody obvious” is not an argument.

The hell it’s not.

Well I guess that settles it then.

eyesay:

In real life, the demand function wouldn’t have such a sharp kink, but it’s still easy to see that if demand is highly elastic (a steeply-sloped demand curve) and supply is inelastic (a nearly flat supply curve), most of the cost of a tax on suppliers would, in fact, be paid by the suppliers.

Nice to have at least some people making the effort to substantiate their views with refutable points, instead of making irrefutable assertions (which are pretty much how religion is defined, in terms of its relationship to science).

Fiction:

Stop nitpicking! All we have to do is pray and things will be OK.

I wonder if you could provide evidence that God is answering your prayers?

Stop questioning that God answers my prayers, it’s bloody obvious!

“bloddy obvious” is not an argument.

The hell it’s not.

Reality:

John Moore:As for military/security spending — many of us believe that it is part of the most import justification for having a government at all: protection from evil doers.

What “many of you believe” (here’s that belief system as the root of thought again), is of very marginal interest to reality, you know?

The point I was making was not about what you do or don’t “believe”, it was about the fact that releasing the “government spending” mental pheromone doesn’t even begin to tell the story of what’s actually going on. It’s what people actually do, what things actually happen, that matter.

Not what religion you “believe” is behind the actions.

I didn’t know we had that many people in US prisons, or that Bush liberated them. Anyone else know who these phantom people were?

John Moore: “bloody obvious” is not an argument.

The hell it’s not.

You can blather all you want about this and that complexity, but ultimately, taxing corporations raises prices for those who consume the goods of the corporation. I am not claiming it is a 100% linear relationship or anything like that, because that is simply irrelevant to the fundamental fact. If you don’t understand that fact, or if you need a cite to show you that, then you are being outrageously clueless, which you aptly demonstrate with:

I was not being sarcastic, and I have no idea why anyone would infer that I was.

In John Mooreland, the more successful lying is in deceiving others, however temporarily, the more virtuous. Next!

I was not being sarcastic, and I have no idea why anyone would infer that I was.

Please cite credible econometric research across industries and across decades that establishes that U.S. federal corporate income taxes

Would one of the lawyers here furnish me whatever phrase you guys use when it is not necessary to cite the bloody obvious?

That may have been his intent, but we now know that Saddam Hussein did not have “WMD”; he posed little threat to U.S. security — in sharp contrast to Al Qaeda and evil doers living in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which Mr. Bush failed to contain.

The WMD issue was but one threat to US interests – there were many more cited in the justification. As for Pak and Afghanistan, if Bush screwed that up so much, how come it took them so long to return to being a problem?

We also know that Bush fabricated the evidence for WMD and encouraged the CIA and others to do so as well;

Right, and he did such a marvelous job that it totally fooled everyone in Congress who voted for the war (including the most vociferous, if amnesic, critics later), and the intelligence agencies of several allied countries. Give that BS a rest, okay? It’s sold old it’s getting moldy.

the need to fabricate evidence casts doubt on whether he ever had any in the first place, which means in turn that his purpose was never to protect America from evil doers but rather to reward certain favored corporations in the United States, such as KBR, Blackwater, Halliburton, etc.

I assume you are being sarcastic, right?

Please cite credible econometric research across industries and across decades that establishes that U.S. federal corporate income taxes are passed on to consumers and not borne at all by corporate employees, management, or shareholders — or, for that matter, are are not paid “for free” to some extent by spurring corporations to innovate and be more productive. Does the answer depend on the amount of international competition faced by the industry?

“As for military/security spending — many of us believe that it is part of the most import justification for having a government at all: protection from evil doers. Bush’s spending was for that purpose, whether you agree with the specifics or not.”

That may have been his intent, but we now know that Saddam Hussein did not have “WMD”; he posed little threat to U.S. security — in sharp contrast to Al Qaeda and evil doers living in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which Mr. Bush failed to contain.

We also know that Bush fabricated the evidence for WMD and encouraged the CIA and others to do so as well; the need to fabricate evidence casts doubt on whether he ever had any in the first place, which means in turn that his purpose was never to protect America from evil doers but rather to reward certain favored corporations in the United States, such as KBR, Blackwater, Halliburton, etc.

In all seriousness, that additional 30% of the GDP buys something that the populace (putatively) approves of.

In all seriousness, that’s correct, but not an excuse for all of it.

josil: If Bush did nothing else in his two terms, he earned the good will of many citizens by sparing us from regimes led by Gore or Kerry. This is not a partisan comment so much as an observation of character–a rather old fashioned virtue.

No, nothing partisan there.

We’ll never get back to that 5% — that’s our defense spending alone — and we’ll never even get back to 30% if current demographic changes aren’t reversed.

We might also never get back to Cholera, widespread illiteracy or rural areas without electricity.

In all seriousness, that additional 30% of the GDP buys something that the populace (putatively) approves of.

John Moore: Or, we could all get Randist and just let them die off.

You said that like you expected anyone to object.

In the libertarian religious belief system, its still 1789.

And the sad thing is, that libertarians have no clue what life was actually like in 1789. It was no libertarian fantasy world, it was a very regulated one, both socially and economically. It’s the social conservatives, not the libertarians, who seem to have a better sense of life then.

Straw man on top of straw man.

Why don’t you explain why its a straw man. I don’t think it is.

The first comment is simply a gratuitous insult tenuously related to the substance of the discussion at hand. The second elaborates upon the first. Got some real arguments?

The really hilarious aspect of it is that members of the Big Business Party now think the poorly paid, leftist Latin labor they’ve imported is going to vote for low taxes and low regulation.

Clue: The “big business” party is whatever party is in a position to help or hurt big business. Thus the Democrat party is the “big business” party. Even worse, it is a corporatist party – buying off (or blackmailing – the distinction is minimal) specific big business interests (but not little business) in order to get support for certain policies.

Clue 2: Labor Unions are a big business.

I think Hoover was the most accomplished person to hold that office since the founders era. (Check out his biography one day, its an incredible list of enduring successes.) His disastrous presidency shows that experience, sound judgment, smarts and accomplishments are not enough for the office. I’d nominate as a key ingredient: humilty in person, and in assessing unintended consequences of the exercise of presidential power.

The really hilarious aspect of it is that members of the Big Business Party now think the poorly paid, leftist Latin labor they’ve imported is going to vote for low taxes and low regulation.

They don’t need to. Big Business lobbyists will ensure that they won’t bear the immediate economic consequences of either regulation or taxes — those will fall on “the other guy”.

Witness for example the CPSIA, which is putting craft businesses and thrift shops out of business while Feds snoop on garage sales.

Well if you simply look at the growth of government spending from 1900 until now you’ll know that to be true – from roughly 5% of GDP to over 35% now. We might never have been truly libertarian, but we were certainly more libertarian.

We’ll never get back to that 5% – that’s our defense spending alone – and we’ll never even get back to 30% if current demographic changes aren’t reversed.

In the libertarian religious belief system, its still 1789.

And the sad thing is, that libertarians have no clue what life was actually like in 1789. It was no libertarian fantasy world, it was a very regulated one, both socially and economically. It’s the social conservatives, not the libertarians, who seem to have a better sense of life then.

Straw man on top of straw man.

Why don’t you explain why its a straw man. I don’t think it is.

Maybe its 1801 when Jefferson became president instead. Or some other long ago date.

The whole libertarian theory is there was a time when free markets and free men strode the earth. Then the heavy hand of “statist” government ruined everything.

Moreover, not one single senator, governor or presidential contender has acted in any way to put the religion of Multiculturalism out of its misery. It is now our new state religion*, with its own Inquisition, and we are now forced to continue to act on the same false assumptions that got us into this mess.

The really hilarious aspect of it is that members of the Big Business Party now think the poorly paid, leftist Latin labor they’ve imported is going to vote for low taxes and low regulation.

The best thing Bush could have done was to reduce legal immigration, control the borders and deport those illegally here. He didn’t do it. He won’t say he should have done it. Obama won’t do it. His successor won’t do it.

* YouTube Obama’s preference at Copenhagen for proof. His remarks come near the end, around 21 minutes.

He believed that Reagan’s, his father’s and Clinton’s support for government was too little, and Obama’s is too big, but his own was just right.

Nothing to see here.

One of them [military/security spending] takes from taxpayers and gives money to corporations, the other [taxing corporations] takes from corporations and gives services to the tax payer. “The people”, you know? Who wrote the constitution.

I just love it when the left, the champions of the little people, unknowingly push strongly regressive tax policies. A corporate tax is exactly that. It is a consumption tax, paid by the customers of the corporation, who are ultimately the consumers. It hits the poorest hardest. Kudos to vfwh for a sane tax policy.

As for military/security spending – many of us believe that it is part of the most import justification for having a government at all: protection from evil doers. Bush’s spending was for that purpose, whether you agree with the specifics or not.

Even libertarians (those not too drunk on silliness) recognize that.

John Moore: As one approaching retirement age, I too will be dependent on that program, and I have yet to see a realistic proposal to take that out of government hands without leaving me and my cohort high and dry and dead.

I think you should walk into a bank, stick a gun in the teller’s face, and say,“I didn’t bother to save enough money in my account here to pay my bills, so give me some from other people’s accounts or I’ll shoot you and take it.”

Or maybe you could take off your ideological blinders and look at how things really work with medical insurance. If you are a corporate employee most of your life (as I was/am), you usually have no choice but to get your medical insurance from them. That medical insurance is not portable and does you no good when you retire. If, during that time, you happen to develop pre-existing conditions (I did by age 30), then you cannot get out of the system and still get insurance. Also, of course, I have been forced to pay Medicare taxes my entire adult life.

I would also argue that the old social contract (pre-statism) was that the young took care of their elderly. Medicare is a socialized way of doing that. I don’t claim it is the best, but in our modern economy of specialization, it takes money, not just a community, to take care of the old. Or, we could all get Randist and just let them die off.