"The flip side would be that the longer the production chain, the higher the embedded taxes"
"Using that logic something with thousands of components, like a car, would have HUGE price reductions."
You obviously don't understand the concept of a production chain. It is the number of steps that a product must pass through, IOW the number of corporate entities that add their corporate income taxes and payroll taxes to the price they pass up to the next level.
Question: If 1,000,000 items are produced from scratch from 500,000 different producers and sold to a single producer who incorporates them into a single product that it then sells to the end user, how many stages are there in the production chain?
(a) one
(b) two
(c) 500,000
(d) 1,000,000
He is the only, yes ONLY poster over the 6 years I've been here that doesn't know how to work with percenages but thinks he does.