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The 23% is currently embedded in the price of goods. It represents the tax that businesses essentially collect, and then pass on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Once businesses are no longer charged this tax, then it is removed from the cost of the good. Therefore, the retail price charged and received by the business for each product reduces by 23%. However, the 23% is added back at the register through a sales tax. Therefore 23% -23% = 0. The price stays the same. The tax is just now collected in a different way, while eliminating the IRS.

The 23% is currently embedded in the price of goods. It represents the tax that businesses essentially collect, and then pass on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Once businesses are no longer charged this tax, then it is removed from the cost of the good.

Embedded taxes represent all taxes, including those paid by employees, according to the man who did your research. The only way to remove these costs is for employees to take pay cuts.

Just for completeness sake, Let's agree that the part of the dollar the business got from the customer that the business used to pay the employee part of the FICA taxes is NOT given to the employee (even though it is not part of the employees gross wage statement, some have argued that the employee should get that amount anyway). Since the business no longer pays any taxes, that amount also becomes surplus and is subject to disposal at the needs of the business as discussed in the prior post.

If the business is a labor intensive business it might have 80% of its costs tied up in labor, 10% tied up in capital, investment, and other misc. costs, and the same 10% profit as before. In addition to the 3% savings on profit tax elimination, the business has another surplus part of the dollar received from the customer because the payroll tax is eliminated (that's wages + employer paid payroll tax = 80% of the dollar from the customer.)

Doing the requisite math puts the employer payroll tax at 5.7% of the customer dollar. Add the two together and the total ELIMINATED direct tax cost is 8.7% (not quite near the 23% you keep claiming is in there.) The only way to get to 23% is by the elimination of some of the labor cost (eg. firing the tax accountant.)

Realizing the missing 14.3% means that labor costs, remembering we already eliminated the cost of the employee part of the payroll tax, have to drop to 60% of the customer dollar (With the original labor cost at 80%, the employee part of the payroll tax represented 5.7%, leaving 74.3% for gross wages. 74.3% less the need 14.3% yields 60%)

That translates into a 20% labor force reduction.

Now I'm not saying that is good or bad, I'm just pointing out that the price reductions through cost reductions and tax redirection will come with another kind of price tag: there is no free lunch.