Roscoe Bartlett: “in a former life I was a small businessman, and I would like to make the argument for a moment that it is impossible to…”

“in a former life I was a small businessman, and I would like to make the argument for a moment that it is impossible to tax business. A tax on a business simply becomes a part of the cost of doing business. If they are going to stay in business, they have to pass that cost on to the consumers, to their customers, which makes a tax on business the most regressive tax we have because the poorest of the poor pay more for everything they get, more for their food, more for their clothing, more for everything they get, all goods and services, because these companies are taxed. So the poor are hurt, first of all, because everything they buy costs more because we are taxing businesses. And, secondly, they are hurt because the tax on business, as the gentleman pointed out, makes them less competitive in a global marketplace. So finally they become noncompetitive, and the job disappears here and appears somewhere on the Pacific Rim. So the poor person who had to pay, to begin with, more for the things he bought now does not even have a job to earn the money to buy the goods. So it is a doubly regressive tax. My liberal friends, when we talk about this, seem to understand it for about 5 minutes, but 10 minutes later they are saying, those rich businesses, we really need to tax them. But in the final analysis we cannot tax a business. It simply becomes a part of the cost of doing business, and they pass that tax on to their consumers.”