OK, I'll accept that the 1913 fed is not connected to the 1791 bank and 1816, so my bad in stating 1791 instead of 1913.
On the other hand, I completely disagree about the following point:
Here is a little starting point for you...corporations don't actually 'pay' taxes, they just collect it for the government from consumers. If the government raises taxes on Civics by $100 each, is Honda going to pay that or are they going to raise the price by a $100 to offset.
Check who is legally responsible for sales tax...if you were legally responsible for it why would Walmart bother to collect it from you.
I've heard this before, but it doesn't make sense. If Honda could just raise their prices by $100 and make $100 more on every Civic, then they would do so regardless of taxes. That's basic supply and demand. They set their price based on the most that the market can bear. If they arbitrarily raise their prices $100 higher, they will most likely make *less* money, because their prices are set based on the optimal market price.
If Honda has greater costs, which could be from taxes or could be from natural disaster or could be from anything else -- they can't just arbitrarily make more money by raising prices. They have to live with the cost and keep trying different ongoing strategies to make more money.
That's incomplete. When considering the true economic effects of anything, you have to account for not just for
the seen, but also the unseen.Prices aren't fixed, and supply and demand is a curve. When the prices of something rise, sales don't abruptly end. Instead, sales gradually decline. The goal of Honda isn't to raise prices as high as possible, but to maximize their revenue, by picking the point on the curve where they make the optimum number of dollars. If the price is too low, they're leaving money on the table. If the price is below costs, they're hemorrhaging money. If the price is too high, too few people will buy it so their overall income will decline. The sweet spot is the point where sales x unit price is highest.
Similarly, when costs increase, companies aren't forced to keep the price the same. They probably want to, because they presumably decided the current price is their optimal one from a revenue standpoint. But they can raise the prices, if they need to. And if costs have increased, one way or the other, they have to, because profit margins in established industries tend to be fairly slim. And taxes are costs.
The result is less sales, and less overall income. The money they can make from that particular market shrinks. All other things being equal, the company will become smaller. Lower revenue means they have to cut things. Fewer factories, fewer employees. The effect on the overall economy is similar, but more distributed. Less money, fewer jobs. It also becomes harder to run a business. More failures, fewer successes. Less incentive to try speculative things. The effect may be tiny, for any particular change. But it's a ratchet. Overtime, all the small restrictions add up.
This can be disguised for a while, by a company tapping into capital reserves, taking money from development, or other short-term accounting tricks. But that's only a temporary solution. There isn't a magical pool of continually replenishing money they can dip into, to make up the difference. Long term, costs are always passed on to the consumers. Any time it appears otherwise, they're just juggling a few factors to hide it for a little bit. This is great for politicians who have something concrete to point to, but it's always a net loss because those temporary distortions have a cost. This also apples to the economy as a whole, but it's even easier to disguise, because negative effects spread over a huge mass of people making voluntary exchanges is very chaotic and hard to measure.