Where do you think the money comes from? Face it, all costs of producing products or providing a service is passed along to the consumer. ALL COSTS. No cost is just "absorbed" unless there is still an acceptable (very large) profit margin. Our major mfg. industries do not have the margins available to absorb even fractions of percentages.
On the other hand, let's assume you are right and they just absorb these costs. Wouldn't that mean that their operating costs are higher than their foriegn competition? Doesn't it mean less money available to pay the stock holders? Doesn't it mean less money available to give raises to employees? Even if they absorb the cost, the American citizen will still absorb the cost in less return on investment, lower wages, etc.
I have no interest in any system that makes stealing from productive people painless. In fact, the more people absorbing the pain the better. If we can make the cost of government largesse as painful as possible for as many people as we can, then that largesse will be slowly wittled back to constitutional duties! If you make it painless, you make it easy to raise the levels of taxation and grow government.
You seem to have taken the anti-conservative position.
When you remove all those embedded taxes NST claims there might be a little room to absorb a tiny little tax -- after all aren't prices going down 20% or more under NST? The same embedded taxes are removed under APT!