Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Letter to the editor:

Taxes have ripple effect

The July 7 editorial cartoon by Mike Smith argues that “The jobs numbers are up, but I’ll be impressed when we return to the days when I only needed one job.” Well, the causes are taxes, taxes, and more taxes. Businesses do not pay tax; they pass the cost on to the consumer.

Think about an automobile, and all the participants in the manufacturing and services across the U.S. supplying parts and services to facilitate the assembly of one. Each business has local, state and federal taxes and fees assessed on their business — property taxes, shipping taxes, payroll taxes, licenses, mandates, the list goes on and on. Each part has a cost increase to cover all these government fees.

The total layers of taxes would take a super computer to manage all the individual tax cost on the final assembly of a car with thousands of individual parts. Our government is the major contributor to inflation when it constantly increases fees, taxes and mandates on businesses. Government jobs are high paying with incredible, yet unsustainable pensions. We need two jobs to pay all the taxes and feed the government.