[meadsjn]

A can of soup that costs $1 at the store will now cost $1.30. I'm still paying taxes just in smaller increments many more times. Other than not paying $125 to get my taxes done at the end of the year, what has the average consumer saved?

If you are currently paying $1.00 for the can of soup, the hidden taxes in the $1.00 are probably about $.37. Every minute of labor involved in the creation of the soup and its contents, the manufacture of the can, all the way back to the mining of the metal, transportation of all parts and the final product, stocking the shelves, and ringing up the sale -- every dollar of labor involved is taxed, and the cost of those taxes are cumulative in the final cost of the product.

Currently, the price of foreign-produced goods only includes the income taxes on the last stages of transportation and sales labor. This puts American-produced products at a great disadvantage against foreign products.

The NRST would for the first time partially spread the burden of taxation to foreign merchants who wish to exploit our consumer market and to illegal immigrants who totally evade the income tax today.

The current Income Tax is a tariff against American labor and American-produced goods and services.

[scubadan]

There's no way I can prove or disprove that 37% of the cost of an item is related to "hidden taxes". I do know that payroll taxes in my labor intensive service business only represents about 1.25% of the customer cost of our product. Last year, federal and state corporate income taxes added about another 1% to the cost of our services. That only totals about 2.25% of taxes that we passed along to our customers.

I have no way of knowing the percentage of "hidden taxes" in the supplies that we use. I would think the percentage of payroll taxes in the cost of a manufactured good would be less than in a labor intensive business since the manufacturer must also purchase the product which they assemble for me. Just for the heck of it, I looked at the level of income taxation paid by some large corporations. Procter & Gamble's % of sales paid to income taxes was 5.4%. For Ford, the latest provision for income taxes was less than 0.1%, for GE it was 3.2%.

I can not find a "payroll tax expense" on any of these companies annual reports. Back in my McDonald's manager days, our goal was to keep food costs at around 33% and total labor costs ar around 20%. Assuming that labor makes up 20% of the cost of a product, only about 2% of that would represent the actual payroll taxes. And some of these payroll taxes would include things like unemployment taxes that won't go away. Using these crude assumptions, we're only at about 5-6% of the cost of an item representing income or payroll taxes that might go away. There must be a lot more in hidden taxes that I'm not seeing to get from these numbers to 37%.