[Bigun]

But you agree that taxes and the costs of planning for and dealing with them are in the prices the miner, smelter, and steel mill must charge for their products if they are to make a profit.

The steel is but one component of an automobile and it has at least three levels of cascading tax and compliance cost embedded in it's price to the automobile manufacturer. That would also be true of every other component of that automobile and how anyone can not see that the final price to the consumer contains all of that is beyond me. The Fairtax would eliminate ALL of that and our products would once again be VERY competitive in world markets.

[KarlInOhio]

OK, each level has compliance costs. To estimate the total effect you need an estimate of the compliance cost at each level and an average amount of costs incurred at a level of production vs. those purchased from another supplier. The total compliance costs would be (one level's compliance cost)/(1 - average production costs coming from another layer). For example, if the average company has 40% of its costs coming from purchasing goods to work on and sell, then the total compliance cost would be 1.67 times the single level compliance costs (1 + .4 + .4*.4 + .4*.4*.4 + ...).

I don't have a good idea on what either the single level compliance costs or the typical company's costs from purchasing from other companies. The second could probably be estimated by getting tax returns from every company and comparing income to non-labor expenses.

Compliance costs would be hard to calculate because I expect that direct compliance costs (hours spent by accountants) would be smaller than the indirect cost of doing economically stupid things to jump through tax hoops. Recently some investors wanted to put money into where I work. Probably 80% of their discussions were about tax consequences of their actions instead of whether their investment would make money.