[gooleyman]

While your understanding of tax/reg problems is excellent, please advise which politician will advocate even the SLIGHTEST rollback in EPA, OSHA, or EEO regs/standards.

Thank you for the compliment. They WOULD advocate it if enough people (voters) understood the problem and demanded it. They keep putting the blame on things other than the real problem. People keep hearing the lies and believe them because they've heard them over and over from "reliable" sources such as the DemocRATS, liberal Republicans and the lamestream news media outlets.

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Last, even though the numbers are noticeable, tax/reg costs are only about 15% (or less) of sales for most organizations. That's not quite the same as the 70% difference in costs for most comparos of China/USA

That number of 15% is true if you only look at the top tier of manufacturing for a product. That 15% is cascaded throughout the whole process of a product from the harvesting of the raw materials all the way up the stream through processing, shipping, manufacturing, marketing, distributing the finished goods, etc. I submit to you that the net effect would be more than the 70% difference between China and here. Remember that the 15% is added at every level and compounded through the whole process in everything we produce. By the time the consumer picks a product off the shelf, I'll bet the net effect of taxes and regulations is up to well over 90%.

[ninenot]

I'll grant your 90% estimate (I'd heard numbers like that before...)

So what?

Actually, even if you took out all the REALLY stupid regs and eliminated C-Corp taxation entirely (a VERY good thing to do...) you still have a problem: certain other countries dumping all kinds of crap into rivers, skies, etc., not to mention certain other countries dumping the dead bodies of laborers into the same places.

All that flapjaw from GWB about "establishing Democracy" in such exotic places as Iraq--and he can't "establish reasonable standards" anyplace else?

Well--he can't. We cannot force PRC, Brazil, India, or Malaysia to accept minimum standards of EPA/OSHA/FLSA. But we CAN tell them to drop dead until they do so.

[XBob]

64 - "That number of 15% is true if you only look at the top tier of manufacturing for a product. That 15% is cascaded throughout the whole process of a product from the harvesting of the raw materials all the way up the stream through processing, shipping, manufacturing, marketing, distributing the finished goods, etc."

Excellent observation.

About 4 years ago, I did some work on our income tax system, and figured out that our true tax rate comes out to about 81% in the US, when you cascade it through the system, and apply the taxes on taxes on taxes at every level, just as you have figured out. And this was just income tax.

Unfortunately, a hard drive crash lost all my work.

And about 15 years ago my brother and another engineer did an analysis on our local unincorporated town and taxes and what it would cost to incorporate in additional taxes. They came up with this very interesting thing, (not unlike Alaska, where the state gives money back to every citizen every year rather than collecting taxes),

Anyway they figured out that if we collected/paid full taxes in for two years, without any spending (not hiring any personnel,etc), and invested the taxes, we could start hiring personnel slowly after the third year, and after 5 years, be up to full city government, and cancel all taxes, leaving the investments to pay for it.