Merry Christmas!

[Kellemora]

We used to have pictures of all my cars, but they were in my basement office which went through two floods, so we lost nearly everything down there.
One of my cousins who was in the service did send me a well worn and folded up picture of one of my race cars, but then we found another dad had taken at his house. Not the whole car though, he was taking a picture of a cat walking across my hood, hi hi.

[yogi]

I only made one brilliant move during my formative years. A neighbor gave me an old 8mm movie camera because he was upgrading to 16mm. It was all mechanical if I recall right and had no batteries. It was a wind up camera. The amazing thing was how well the movies played back when projecting them onto a screen.

So, one day I had the camera in hand while grandpa and my dad were out in the garden. I started the film rolling and they hammed it up pretty good. That afternoon the back yard broke out in a water fight. My cousin was visiting and our antics attracted a few of the neighbors. I thought to myself that it was a scene that should be preserved for future generations. Why I was concerned about future generations at the ripe old age of 16 is beyond me. Well, the film was perfectly preserved inside a metal canister for something like thirty or forty years. I had a pro transfer it to CD and distributed it to the parties in the film who were still living. I am the only one who has any pictures of grandpa. The cousins all have pictures of themselves but apparently nobody but yours truly has film.

Distributing that classic footage was my 15 minutes of fame. Nobody remembers or cares about what's on that CD these days.

[Kellemora]

I understand Yogi. I had numerous family artifacts I was paying to keep in specialized historical artifact storage. The cost kept climbing a little bit every year until I could no longer afford it, so I got everything out and offered it to the family members I though most would want it. Many of the items had their full history with them too. Seemed nobody wanted any of it, sorta glad in a way, because some of it fetched really decent money on eBay.
I did keep several things for a number of years after that, but then slowly got rid of most of it too. I kept what would be considered family heirlooms though and already passed those on to whom should get them.

When I was a kid, I had a crank projector and about a dozen or so short cartoon films.
When my sister worked for Bell and Howell, she got me a nice camera and projector.
Sad to say, neither of them lasted very long though. We did take a couple of the home movie films and convert them to VHS, and one of those a few years ago to CD for my youngest sister.

I have tons of photographs converted to digital of most of our family members, relatives and friends. Many of them taken by my parents or grandparents. I was lucky to get other relatives to loan me their pictures long enough to scan and get back to them. So have a fairly large collection going back many years in some cases.

Pictures I wish I still had, which were lost in the floods, were ones only I had a copy of, so no way to replace them.
And I think I mentioned once, my wife lost hundreds of pictures when her computer crashed, and although we had a backup program back up her entire computer on a regular basis, the backup program itself did not backup anything. It merely placed a link on the external hard drive pointing back to the computers hard drive.
Because of this, when we checked the backups to make sure they were all there, they were, or so we thought. It was only after her hard drive failed we figured out what the backup program was doing. Sad loss for her, because she had all of her sons pictures from baby to graduation, and every pet and car she ever owned, plus of course family gatherings, etc.

Now you know yet another reason why I don't do backups. I copy and paste, check to make sure it's there, then copy it again as a mirror to another drive and check that. Sure glad I had tons of redundancies after I got hit with a Ransomware attack.

[yogi]

There are many good strategies to use for backups. Redundancy cannot be beat regardless of the technique. When I was looking into various backup software I discovered that all the good ones were expensive and designed for enterprise level recovery. The free ones were suspect given that I know nothing is truly free. Who knows what else they install besides the backup routines? In the end I found something that does what you do, but automatically. It will copy files, directories, or entire drives one at a time. There are menus to specify what to copy and where to put it. Then there is the option to do full, differential, or incremental backups. There is nothing better than full backups for my situation. When I think about it I probably could have written some script to do the same thing. I thought I might have to because the company giving away the software went out of business. But, so far it's working perfectly on Windows 7. All my backups go to a hard drive separate from the one the OS is on. I then manually copy the most current backups to USB memory sticks. On occasion I'll make an image of the whole system and keep that on an external USB drive. There is only one thing I could do to enhance the strategy. That would be to have a set of sticks and drives in the fireproof safe down in the basement. But all that is an extra step and bordering on paranoia. LOL

The point I want to make here is that when I decided on a strategy, I tested it out fully to be sure it does what I wanted it to do. I have in fact had occasion to recover from that image on the hard drive. I thanked my lucky stars a hundred times for that. But, now, with Windows 10 there is no option for doing images anymore. They keep a copy on the local drive from which to recover. If that drive is fried you must do a clean install. The caveat there is that you lose all your created files if you do not use Microsoft's cloud to back up your system. I don't use their cloud and have never been able to recover a crashed Windows 10. It always needed a clean install. Of course, I know I am using beta software, but I have a feeling the same thing happens in the wild.

[Kellemora]

I never had any luck in backing up an entire system. Even made an IOS once after I had my system set up exactly the way I wanted it, with all the programs I like, but no data on the system yet. It sounded like a good idea at the time to save having to do a fresh install. Trouble is, with so many updates, when I did go to reinstall the OS from the CD, it did install, but would not run afterward. This was before I knew about virtual box too. But never got good at using VB, it was always way to slow or wouldn't let me do things I was used to doing.

The only things really important are my data and image files, which of course include my accounting and other things.
I don't like backup sets, so always save everything in it's existing usable format, as a copy to an external, then would mirror the external to an off-site external.

I use RSync to copy each thing I do to an external as I finish making changes in each folder.
I used to use RSync to copy off-site, but I find it almost impossible to set-up and keep working right.
So I manually drag a hard drive from the house up to my office, and then use RSync to copy from one external to the other external, then carry it back down to the house. Trouble is, I've been very lax about doing that lately. So just put the super important stuff, a direct copy over to the NAS. Time consuming on larger files.

There are only a few things I have that folks who survive me might be interested in anyhow. So those things are placed on an external drive formatted for Windows ntfs, and on the NAS.
Wish I had the time to go through everything and get rid of duplicates and make a clean drive of all files once again, then copy that to an off-site drive.

[yogi]

I think if I had a business I would be more concerned about backups. Given I have nothing on the LAN that I can't do without, I probably don't need to backup at all. However, your story, and others, about being taken down by ransomeware prompted me to find a way to recover from such an attack. My system isn't enterprise quality, but it will preserve all the important stuff for 5 generations back.

I never attempted to create a system image on Linux. I consider all the Linux installs I have to be disposable. I'm kind of thinking an image would not buy much because of the simplified directory structure. In reality it only saves time reinstalling programs from scratch. Virtual Box has the snapshot feature which in essence is an image. It's portable too. If I understand it correctly Ubuntu now offers something similar with the snapshot being stored out in the cloud somewhere. That idea actually may have some merit, but I never had to restore a system that way. It sounds nice in theory, but the real world is often more difficult to deal with.

[Kellemora]

One of the reasons I quit disposing of anything that had to do with business and taxes is because they can go back virtually forever. Or to word it properly, they can go back 7 years, and if they find something, they can go back 7 years prior, ad infinitum. In other words, you had better have on hand that contract from 35 or 50 years ago to prove the terms.

Assume you made a personal loan to a person to help them start a business in 1989 as a combined personal/business loan.
The terms contained an unusual payment schedule which changed on each 5th year anniversary, and the low interest rate would be paid off prior to payments being applied to the principle.
No payments were due until the first anniversary date, unless the company reached a certain income level. Interest would be rolled into the loan, thus increasing the loan amount due.
Assume the initial loan was an even 100k at 5% annual interest with a cap at 25k, then no interest would ever be added after that figure was reached.
The company did become successful and started making monthly payments starting about midway through the fourth year.
By the second anniversary date in 1999 they had paid off all interest owing, and reduced the principle down to 80k.

You paid all of your taxes on the income derived from the interest collected from the loan.
By the third anniversary date, the company income level dropped enough, they requested following a payment schedule outlined in the original contract to protect the individual should the company fail. The monthly payment amount was a percentage of his combined business and personal checking accounts on the last day of each month, but still leaving him a minimum of 500 bucks in each of the accounts to cover expenses, else only a 1 dollar payment was necessary that month.
The purpose of this clause was to allow them to pay after they were paid for sold orders, which under normal circumstances would keep them caught up. Nothing wrong with being paid this way on a no interest loan. The principle just dropped slower is all.

The original ledgers showing the principle and interest in separate columns, and payments made on the interest first were in an accounting program which can no longer be accessed. But for the past 20+ years, only payments on the principle were required, so no interest column is in the current and recent past ledgers.

Now, bring in the IRS who claim the monthly payments from the company to you is income and taxes are due on income.
Umm, wait a minute, the repayment of principle is not income.
IRS, anytime money changes hands it is income to the recipient.
Umm, not when they are only paying back money you loaned them.
Can you show us the loan contract.
Umm, that was 30 years ago, and I've moved a few times since then, plus was flooded out twice, I doubt I still have it. But I do have all the ledger books for the past 18 years, showing they paid no interest, and it all came off the principle.

We made numerous printouts for them to look over. In retrospect, this was a mistake. When we closed out one year and started the new year, the small amount of interest from a separate column was added to the principle and it showed an increase of like 1,200.00 with no explanation. I could explain it easily, and also showed them my personal taxes where I did pay income tax on the interest, or at least showed it on my personal income tax return.
I thought they were finally satisfied. But no, a month later, they wanted some more records, else I would have to pay a hefty fine.
For once I lucked out. The years they wanted to see, were the same years I used an auditing agency to do my taxes, and although there was a charge to get the paperwork, they had it all, and apparently someone their talked to the IRS office and cleared up how my account read.
Ironically, after everything was all said and done, I found the original contract in an old lockbox of which the key was broken off and I thought it was empty. Turns out there was a lot of stuff in there that had to do with my businesses. Some legal papers, permits, licenses, and registrations dating all the way back to 1972, when I started my very first real business. Nostalgia!

[yogi]

That's quite an amazing loan. Even more amazing is the resources behind the IRS investigators. I have a hell of a time organizing and documenting my personal income taxes, which I need only keep for three years so they say. Of course if I do something illegal, then that forever record keeping goes into effect for me too. I probably could run a business, but I'd hire an accountant to do the bookkeeping. Then again, what do I know about running a profitable business? Most certainly I could never audit anybody's operation. I became fairly good at reading and understanding balance sheets, but I had to trust the auditors to ascertain the numbers were correct.

I read where certain states are trying to get the businesses therein to use a standardized software package so that their IRS could keep track of the operation in real time. Thus it would be difficult to cheat on one's taxes. The debate is if the government can force a company to use specific software. I guess it's like the Obamacare people forcing you to buy insurance. I don't think it's legal for the government to make you buy a specific product.

[Kellemora]

Many eons ago, when I was doing Hydroculture, the IRS decided to audit me. They found a couple of discrepancies, however they were in my favor, so they owed me more money than I claimed as a refund.
This must have set some type of red flag in their system, because they audited me each year for six more years, and each time they owed me money.
Being raised in the florist business, accounting for agriculture is a little different than accounting for tangible products.
In other words, you can't count your chickens before they hatch, or the number of seeds or cutting you can get from a crop.

In a normal retail business, you order the products for your inventory, plus inbound freight costs, and have a countable inventory. You also have inventory shrinkage through damage and theft of course, but the bottom line is, you have product to sell.
Manufacturing is a tad different because you have several raw ingredients that go into the manufacture of a product or part you sell.
But when you get into agriculture, you are working with a perishable product with a specific lifespan.
You buy 20 times more roses on certain holidays to sell to customers for those holidays.
Sudden higher inventory purchases, tosses up red flags to the IRS, because they equate to the Expense column.

I may buy 1000 cuttings and only end up with 50 sales, because they didn't take.
Or I may buy 0 cuttings and show sales of 500 units, because I made my own cuttings from existing inventory.
Normal Accounting is not geared to things like that, and always tosses red flags up.

How the IRS wants to get you is, in the first example buy 1000, sell 50, and show a loss. Why?
Then in the second example, buy 0 and sell 500, and show a profit. IRS claims Excess Profits with no cost basis!
Are we laundering money, hi hi.

Around 1985 or shortly thereafter, I switched to the Bulk Unit method of accounting, which actually requires three separate sets of books, and a single double entry accounting ledger, but makes things a whole lot simpler.
Makes inventory a whole lot simpler too. You are not counting individual seeds or pounds of seeds anymore, and comparing it to how many plants you harvested, except in your own record books. As far as accounting goes, you have entire Unit of seeds as a single Unit, and you have whatever number of plants it produced as a Single Unit. The Unit cost so much and it sold for so much, nice clean double entry system. Expense vs Income = Profit (or loss) the IRS understands, without all the other confusing entries of how the expense or income was derived.

[yogi]

I love your example of apparent money laundering. You are making something from nothing apparently. I think that farmers must run into similar situation when the subsidies they get must be accounted for with black magic accounting too.

The Bulk Unit accounting makes a lot of sense to me. It's similar to trading stocks and equities. In fact you are dealing with a commodity. There is a cost basis that can be calculated several different ways. In the long term it gets tricky if you don't have all the transaction statements, which is easy to do if you are investing over several decades. No taxes are paid until a sale is executed and then you better have an explanation for the bottom line. The bulk unit idea is effectively applied to individual stock purchases over time by simple averaging of the costs. Commodities work the same way but over a shorter time span.

There is always talk of simplifying the tax code. Great idea but difficult to do. If we were starting from ground zero things could be a lot more simple and efficient. But undoing the present system and replacing it with something more manageable is and has been a nightmare. I'm not sure it's possible to simplify things anymore.

[Kellemora]

When I was renovating homes, including historical homes I didn't own myself, their Basis still affected my taxes.

Folks who use a room in their house for an office, and claim it as an office expense for deductions, many don't realize that the income received from the rental charges reduces the Basis of their home.
Thus when you sell your home, the difference between the Basis, and the Selling Price, is taxed as income.
The lower your basis becomes, the more taxes you will pay on its sale.

I had an unusual situation where I was renting office and storage space from a 3rd party.
Part of our agreement was I would pay 1/7th of the utility bills, which was actually more than fair.
It also tossed up a red flag for the IRS. They knew what the minimum charge for each item on the utility bill was, and on two of those items, I was paying less than the minimum charge. So they called me in to find out.
I showed them my contract for my share of the utilities, and they were pleased, now that they understood how I got by so cheap. So no problem there.
They used a copy of my contract to check up on the 3rd party I was renting from, to make sure they were claiming the income on their tax returns. Fortunate for them, they were, but their total income was so low, it didn't affect their taxes.

Now comes the tangled situation.
I knew enough about real estate transactions, and taxes, that I managed to get the property to change hands without generating a sale. This did two things, although their was a five year window when taxes could still be a liability.
The first thing it did was negate any an all equity position for the former owner, and set the basis of the home at zero for the current owner. Therefore they could continue to rent out space on the property without reducing their basis, although they still had to show the rental fees as income. The original rental contract went along with the change of hands of the property.
I should note that the changing of hands of a property without a sale is not an easy thing to do, and takes several months to accomplish, as it requires a set of well defined steps to pull it off legally.
The purpose of this loophole is to prevent the government from taking family homesteads out from under the heirs, provided it is done before the original owner passes away. Once the transaction is complete and the property does change hands, it is tied up for five years where the government can still get their half of the value of the property if the original owner dies within that five year time frame.
So many people do not know about how to keep from losing the family home, if they can't afford to pay the 48% inheritance tax on the property due in some states. Each state has their own rate of theft from families!

Although the contract for the utilities went along with the change of hands of the property. If the new owner of the property is the same person who was renting from the former owner. Is the contract still valid as a business deduction for the owners company? What about the rent the company pays to the current owner?
The answer to both of those questions is Yes! With a twist for the current owner. It cannot reduce the basis of his house, because the basis was already zero.

[yogi]

I never did think inheritance tax was fair. Now in Missouri I must pay personal property tax which I also do not agree with. Be that as it may, the truth of the matter is that it takes a specific amount of money to run a government regardless of any corruption that may or may not be going on. That money has to come from someplace, which is why there are so many varied taxes. To my way of thinking there should be no individual taxes at all. This country is run by corporations who own the politicians that make the laws for them to operate at a profit. So, since it is the corporations running this place, they should be the ones to pay all the taxes.

Fat chance of THAT happening. LOL

There are no doubt several ways to transfer ownership of real property without a cash sale. We considered creating a living trust at one time but discovered that our belongings were not enough for the state of Illinois to be concerned about. So we abandoned that idea. I have no idea what the state of Missouri is up to, but I do know I'm a lot poor now than I was in Illinois.

[Kellemora]

OK, this is a point I will disagree with you on 100%, speaking of corporate taxes. Corporations should not be taxed at all!

Do you realize there is not a single corporation in the US who directly pays the government any taxes?
Not one red cent!

What they do is collect the tax from you the consumer, at a markup so they make a profit from collecting those taxes for the government and passing them on to the government.
John Doe consumer on the other hand is paying 5 to 7 times more in taxes than what the tax the government actually gets, because the rest is profit for the corporations. And if your city or state has Sales Tax, you are paying Sales Tax on all the inflated taxes hidden in the purchase price.

I can go through the lengthy explanation of how you are paying well more than your share of taxes for the corporations. Basically, it amounts to you are paying 5 dollars in taxes to corporations for every 1 dollar they send to the government.
By not charging corporations with taxes, we would have to still pay the 1 dollar in tax the government gets, but we wouldn't have to pay the 4 dollars in profit going to the corporations, or any business for that matter.
Taxing a corporation at any rate is merely a tax on yourself, not them, at a highly inflated rate.

On the other issue. Yes, taxes are needed to pay for all the things a city needs to take care of. If they would not be pocketing half the money they get, it would go a lot further than it does.

You hear how Tennessee is a poor state with lower taxes than anywhere else. Don't believe it!
My Real Estate taxes here in Tennessee are more than triple what I paid in Real Estate taxes in Creve Coeur.
In St. Louis, you have the Planetarium, the Science Center, The Zoo, and several Museums, all open to the public for free.
Here in Knoxville, we have none of those things for free. In fact, our Science Center's displays are 20 year old hand-me-downs from places like St. Louis. Our tiny little Zoo costs a fortune to get in.

Personal Property taxes in St. Louis County were very high, that much I will agree with. But not as ridiculous as in some other counties in other states. They will tell you we don't have Personal Property taxes here, which is a lie, we do, they are just called by other names, for eg. Wheel Tax in lieu of PP tax.
There are thousands of things they charge taxes for here that we never had to pay in St. Louis County, or if we did, not to the high percentages they have here.

I'll close by saying this. As a lifelong owner of businesses, I never cared one iota how much the government charged my companies in taxes. Of course I complained about it quite loudly, as do most business owners. But the bottom line remains the same, we make a small profit on the taxes we collect and pass on to the government. 100% of all taxes we pay out, regardless of for what reason, Real Estate, Personal Property, Excess Inventory, you name it, if it is taxed, those costs are figured into the Cost of Goods Sold. We take the Cost of Goods Sold, ADD our intended markup, and sell to the next buyer in the chain of either manufacturing or distribution or both. They in turn do the same, add their taxes into the Cost of Goods Sold, add their markup and move the product on down the line to the next buyer.
If company #1 only had 1 dollar of taxes added per unit sold after their markup. By the time it finally reaches the retail store shelf, that initial 1 dollar in tax has grown to 5 dollars in hidden taxes in the retail selling price. John Doe consumer pays Sales Tax on that hidden 5 dollars, so they are paying tax on tax on tax up to 7 times, in a country where there shall not be tax on taxes.

[yogi]

As happens frequently, you and I see the same phenomena through different eyes.

There is no question about why businesses remain in operation. They are profitable. The only people who can afford to operate at a loss is the government. Profit is what's left over after all expenses are accounted for. When a company pays a tax on materials used to manufacture a product that is considered an expense. Yes, taxes are an expense and I'd be surprised if you as a businessman didn't understand that. Saying that the end user is paying a (sales) tax on a tax the company paid for materials is misleading and not even accurate. Whatever expenses occur prior to the sale are irrelevant at the point of sale. The tax is on the purchase transaction and not on the cost of raw material for the goods being purchased.

Likewise, every business has something called overhead. In some instances it's intangible and cannot be accounted for readily. I currently am living off the taxes Motorola collected from me and passed onto the Social Security Administration. That transfer of tax money doesn't happen by magic, as you well know. It takes people, machines, and brick and mortar buildings in order to make it happen. All those expenses must be added on to the final cost of the product. Is the company raising it's unit cost price excessively to cover the cost of collecting FICA? Well ten different accountants will give you ten different explanations, but at the end of the day the company collecting taxes and passing them on to the government encounters an expense in performing that transaction. Not only that, but the company is required by law to do it. You would have a hard time convincing me that the books show X-amount of dollars collected in taxes while the company only transferred half that amount. Companies are not legal taxing entities. The "excess" tax has to appear on the books in some form or another. It's either overhead or fraud.

There is no such thing as a hidden tax. You may want to call it that, but anything truly hidden from the IRS will put a company out of business.

[Kellemora]

As you say, All Materials and Overhead is an expense. And all Expenses and Labor become the figure used for Cost of Goods sold. The Cost of Goods is then marked up to obtain the selling price.
Assume I have $1.00 in taxes contained in the Cost of Goods sold figure, and being the first company in the long chain of manufacturing companies before we reach the distribution companies and the final retailer.
Each level of manufacturing works on roughly the same markup schedule.
However, when you reach the chain of distribution, each level has their own markup schedule and it is higher than the previous link in the chain of distribution. In most cases, the Retailer doubles his cost, and adds inbound freight, to determine the shelf price of the product.
I've done the calculations on this chain of manufacturing, and also the chain of distribution, many times.
It always comes out the same. For every $1.00 in tax at the beginning of the chain, the Consumer is paying $5.00 at the register. Each link in the chain is also adding in their taxes paid to their cost of goods sold, which is how the consumer ends up paying $5.00, it's not just from the first company in the chain, they are only reaping about $1.10 to $1.20 in return. Each level of manufacturing is reaping a 10 to 20 cent profit for tax handling. Then in the chain of distribution, the amount collected as profit escalates considerably.
I've handled business accounting for over 50 years, so know exactly what happens all throughout the chain.

I thought I had kept some of the tables I had written for others, but can't seem to find them. Probably on another computer or perhaps I just made the example chains in various e-mails.
Some day if I have time, I will create a new indisputable chart for you to study.
They clearly show the companies make a profit on the taxes they collect from the consumer, who is stuck paying 5 to 7 times more than the actual amount of money going to the government.

Oh, by hidden, I meant to the Consumer. The IRS is full aware of what taxes are applied where and by how much.
The IRS also does not want people to know how much they are paying in taxes, or ALL TAXES would have to be maintained on a separate line and spelled out on the price label, and consumers would only pay tax on the actual price of the product, but not on the long line of taxes shown on the receipt, if it were done that way.
It would not be an accounting nightmare as some claim to keep taxes as a separate line item in the Cost of Goods Sold.
But then companies could not profit on the taxes they paid when they recoup that expense from the customers.

[yogi]

Top of the line Apple iPhone can be had for around $1500. It's really hard to get a discount because of the contracts Apple has with the distribution network the own. So, we can safely say that anybody buying a high end iPhone is going to pay $1500. You and I as well as everybody else not born yesterday knows that the price of that phone is horribly inflated. The cost of materials is probably near $300 and doubling that for "overhead" we can speculate it costs Apple $600 to put that phone on their shipping dock.

So when I shop around and find out that there is literal price control on those iPhones, I have to make a decision. How bad do I want that iPhone? It's the most expensive damned phone you can buy and doesn't do anything more than the Motorola equivalent that can be bought for under $250. So what am I paying for when I hand over $1500 to Apple's distributor? The privilege of owning an Apple phone! Am I paying 5 times the tax that the Apple Factory is paying for that same phone? Yes, and that is because the phone has value added by the time it gets to me. Admittedly a lot of that added value is only perception, but at the point of sale the tax on $1500 is well more than the tax on $300. There is no question about everybody in the supply chain paying their fair share of taxes. But it's not cumulative. Each transaction is separate and unique. As a consumer I am not reimbursing the Apple factory for the tax burden it must bare. I'm paying the rent at the local Best Buy who already compensated Apple and all their distributors before them.

All the taxes that are paid by the people who make the silicon that go into the chips right up the the franchised store owner who must honor the fair trade agreement with Apple would make for an interesting graph. I'd love to see it. But the so called "profit from taxes" is no more real than the cost difference between what I pay for the iPhone and the actual cost of manufacturing it. Apple will sell their phones for whatever price the market will bear, taxes be damned. Like any other company, Apple's sole purpose in life is to maximize profits, with an huge emphasis on maximize.

I can also point out the printers that are sold by Hewlett Packard at a loss. They eat the cost of taxes and then some. They do this because they will maximize their profits selling ink. You and I are talking about the same things, but we both are calling it something different.

[Kellemora]

If a company did not recoup their tax expense they would be out of business in short order.
It MUST be included in their Cost of Goods Sold, no way around it. Then they apply the markup!
I know of no company that does it any other way.

[yogi]

I'd have to agree with you about covering overhead and applying a markup for profit. I don't necessarily see all the factors in that markup the same way you do. The beauty of our capitalistic free enterprise system is exactly what we have been talking about. Goods and services sell for whatever the market will bear. That creates competition which in turn benefits the consumer. In spite of all the corruption and greed, our system has been doing well up to this point in time.

[Kellemora]

My only real point was the profiteering from collected taxes at the expense of the consumer 5 to 7 fold of what Uncle Sam gets out of it.
I'm not against taxes, they are a necessary evil. Yet provide many benefits.
I would rather pay the government $1.00 directly than pay the corporations $5.00 for them to send $1.00 of what they collected from us to the government. We would save $4.00 and the government would still get the same amount.

[yogi]

I don't understand what you are trying to describe. And I read it all a couple times. LOL

There is no way a company can take $5 in taxes from a consumer and only send $1 of it to the government. They have to account for that $4 difference if they did. In all my online dealings there is something called shipping and handling. They will charge me $20 to send a package USPS costing them $7. They never call that a tax. It's still outrageous given the profit they make on the main item. I like the way Jet.com handles such things. They make you buy a certain amount of goods and then shipping is free. Free my a$$. The cost is built into the product price and is indeed transparent. Jet collects Missouri sales tax but that's at the going rate. No inflation as far as I can tell. It's pretty much the same with retailers around town. The sales receipt breaks down the transaction into separate items. Taxes are a line item at the going rate that can be verified.

I know what you are saying when you point out that everybody in the supply chain pays a tax and adds that into their overhead costs. If the chain is lengthy the total taxes paid along the way can be enormous but they are in no way connected to the sales tax one pays when purchasing goods over the counter. My story about cell phone and printer pricing clearly shows how unrelated the supply chain taxes are to the cost of goods.