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INcome taxes are not a "cost" if there is no profit there is no income tax.

The income tax system certainly imposes costs on a busiess, whether or not the business ends up owing a any income tax per-se.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/compliance2002.html

Overhead Compliance Costs

The complexity generated by the growth and constant change of the tax code creates two general types of economic cost: overhead and opportunity cost. Overhead can be divided into three principal activities: the economically sterile exercises of tax planning, compliance, and litigation, all of which act like tax surcharges on taxpayers.

• The first type of overhead is tax planning, which in this context refers to all the economic decisions that individuals and firms make to maximize their benefits in the tax code.

• The second type of overhead, tax compliance, refers here to the basic actions required to file the federal income tax, including record keeping, education, form preparation and packaging/sending.

• The third type of overhead is tax audits and litigation, referring to the cost of the IRS and the Tax Court, as well as all the legal costs that taxpayers incur while dealing with these two government institutions.

Of these three costs, the second, tax compliance, is the only one estimated in this report. It is for this reason that the data presented here should be viewed as extremely cautious estimates of the federal income tax compliance burden on taxpayers.

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The Burden of Compliance Costs

As shown in , and , the Tax Foundation estimates that in 2002 individuals, businesses and non-profits spent over 5.7 billion hours complying with the federal income tax. Using an hourly cost of $29.98 for individuals and $37.26 for businesses and non-profits, the estimated cost of compliance in 2002 is $194 billion (See Methodology section for details about how the hours and wages were determined)—Individuals bear a cost of $86.1 billion, businesses bear a cost of $102.5 billion and non-profits bear a cost of $5.4 billion. Therefore, the overall compliance cost surcharge alone amounts to nearly 20.4 cents for every $1 collected by the federal income tax.

The same figure that Dr. Williams uses.

Dr. Walter E. Williams, March 2000:
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39b6487a1fb0.htm

The average taxpayer now pays more than $8,000 a year, working from January 1 to May 8 to pay federal, state, and local taxes. In addation to the out-of-pocket cost, Americans spend 5.4 billion hours each year complying with the federal tax code-roughly the equivalent of 3 million people working full time. If it were employed in productive activity, the labor now devoted to tax compliance would be worth $232 billion annually. The federal cost of hiring 93,000 IRS employees is $6 billion. If these Americans weren't fooling around with the tax code, they could produce the entire annual output of the aircraft, trucking, auto, and food processing industries combined..." Emphasis added

But only the beginning of the costs that are imposed on businesses throughout the production chain by the current federal income/payroll tax system.

American General Contractor's Association
http://www.agc.org/Legislative_Info/Members_Testify/testimony_04-10-00.asp

Paperwork is the most visible compliance cost, but it is clearly not the only, and perhaps not the largest compliance costs. Return processing, determining liability, recordkeeping and other burdens are an estimated 19 to 33 % of the total revenue raised by the income tax system and 2.0 to 3.5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)[an additional 3% of GDP₁₉₉₉ = $279Billion]. We waste money each year on seeking to avoid taxes, avoid trouble with the IRS, interpret the laws or determining the best course of actions with the laws.

Adding to the costs and to unfairness, our tax laws are so complicated not even the common tax lawyer can understand them. There are a number of ways of measuring complexity; one of which is the number of penalties issued and then abated for reasonable cause. There are more than 34 million civil penalties issued each year; more than a third of all small firms receive payroll tax-related penalties alone. More than 50 percent are abated.

Our government embroiled its citizens in more than 35,000 litigation actions. Taxpayers sustained more than 3 million levies. As long as we insist upon an income tax system, the system needs to be complex. The system needs to be enforced with a heavy hand. The system needs to have all of the 34 million in civil penalties. The system needs to be intrusive. It is the price we have to pay for an income tax system.

It is not a harmless myth. The hidden cost of our tax system ensures that Americans remain ever ignorant of the increasing proportion of federal taxes they pay. Taxes are now more than 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product, and despite the claims of tax cuts, Americans pay more now than we have in the history of our nation, including the height of World War II. Upstream taxes only ensure that taxpayers cannot see the true cost of our government, raise the costs of goods and services and ensure more taxes in the future.

There is another problem with hidden taxes. Apart from ensuring the system lacks integrity, hidden taxes buried in goods and services reduce exports, and result in lower profits, lost productivity and a competitive advantage to foreign commodities.

Taken altogether, the true tax burden impressed upon us all through higher prices and loss of productivity exceeds the mere revenue collected by the govenment by substantially more even than the $593 billion estimate of James Payne in 1995:

Town Crier Staff Writer
Clyde Noel : http://www.losaltosonline.com/latc/arch/9528/

"In a book titled "Costly Returns," economist James Payne estimates the nation's bill for tax record-keeping, audits, filing tax attorneys and accountants totals an astonishing $593 billion. To put it another way, that's more than twice as much as last year's entire defense budget and $240 billion more than all 1996 Social Security outlays."

Broader estimates for example like that of Daniel Pilla:

Killing the IRS, By Daniel J. Pilla, Reason Magazine July 1995

"There is little about a flat-tax system that will trim the staggering cost of tax law compliance. At present, this burden is estimated at $700 billion annually. Much of the cost is associated with recordkeeping and tax law enforcement, neither of which is reduced by a flat tax. A flat tax certainly involves a simpler tax return, but return preparation is the smallest component of tax law compliance.
The solution to our tax problem is to adopt a national retail sales tax in place of the personal and corporate income tax. Only a sales tax can eliminate the invasiveness of the IRS, since one's income and lifestyle are irrelevant."

Not to mention the even greater losses on the economy that result from depessed sales(deadweight losses) as a concequence of tax system inflated prices much of which would be relieved by removing the more direct tax related business costs accounted for above.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/hl565.cfm

An American Economic Review study found that every dollar of taxes could impose as much as $4 of lost output on the economy, with the probable harm ranging between $1.32 and $1.47
Edgar K. Browning, "On the Marginal Welfare Cost of Taxation," American Economic Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (March 1987), pp. 11-23.

"Another study in the Journal of Political Economy estimated that the corporate income tax costs more in lost output than it raises for the government."Jane G. Gravelle and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, "The Incidence and Efficiency Costs of Corporate Taxation When Corporate and Noncorporate Firms Produce the Same Good," Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 97, No. 4 (1989), pp. 749-780.

Chief Executive, The New directions in tax reform -
May 1995.

Tax expert Ernest Christian Jr., a partner with Washington's Patton, Boggs & Blow, reckons these are low estimates or at best incomplete. Citing a U.S. Treasury study which indicates that 6 billion man-hours are consumed each year just in the record keeping for income and payroll tax returns alone, Christian says the true burden on the U.S. economy is probably closer to $1 trillion. For example, Jane Gravelle of the Congressional Research Service estimates that economic loss from the corporate income tax is equal to about 97 percent of the corporate tax revenue collected.

STATEMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE DICK ARMEY
HEARING ON THE IMPACT ON
INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES OF REPLACING THE FEDERAL INCOME TAX
Committee on Ways and Means, Full Committee, 4-15-97 Testimony

Hinders Economic Opportunity

According to a study by Jane Gravelle, an economist with the Congressional Research Service, and Larry Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University, the corporate income tax costs the economy more in lost production than it raises in revenue for the Treasury. Dale Jorgenson, the chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard University, found that each extra dollar the government raises in revenue through the current system costs the economy $1.39.

Economic Burden of Taxation
William A. Niskanen
Presented October 2003
Friedman Conference
Federal Reserve Bank Dallas page 6.
www.dallasfed.org/news/research/2003/03ftc_niskanen.pdf

"Given that the elasticity c implicit in recent U.S. fiscal conditions is about 0.8 and the average tax rate is about 0.3, the marginal cost of government spending and taxes in the United States may be about $2.75 per additional dollar of tax revenue. One wonders whether there are any government programs for which the marginal value is that high. Given the estimate of the long-term elasticity c from the U.S. time-series data, the marginal cost of government spending and taxes may be as high as $4.50 at the current average tax rate. "