Your links proves my point they do not disregard it in several areas here is one from the heritage org link you have provided Statutory or Legal Obligation of an Excise Tax Who pays a selective excise tax The legal obli gation to pay would depend on the wording of the statute It might be called either a consumer level tax e g the gasoline excise tax collected at the pump or a producer level tax e g the alcohol and tobacco taxes collected from manufacturers As the diagram shows the distinction is eco nomically meaningless and does not reflect the economic division of the tax burden Consumers and producers are both affected to some degree regardless of the statutory label How they share the incidence of the tax depends entirely on their responsiveness to the price changes the slopes of the supply and demand curves not on whether the wording of the statute charges the consumer with the tax and it is merely collected by the seller and forwarded to the government or whether the statute names the seller as being charged with the tax directly Further they discuss Tax base destortion as a real factor The Perfect Non Distorting Tax Base Politicians eagerly seek these last two situations of perfectly inelastic sup ply and demand in their quest for the perfect tax base No matter how high they might push the tax on such a prod uct the tax base would not collapse and revenues would keep climbing In particular poli ticians like to believe that the demand curves for cigarettes liquor and gambling are perfectly inelastic They are wrong but they keep pushing tobacco and alcohol tax rates higher hoping for a miracle They also get stingy with the payout ratios on state sponsored lotteries In this case it is those who buy lottery tickets who are hoping for a mira cle In theory governments could reduce eco nomic distortions and minimize dead weight losses by putting the highest tax rates on the prod ucts or inputs that are in most inelastic demand or supply The ultimate example of a non distorting tax would be a head tax or poll tax that is owed just for being alive and is totally unrelated to any incre mental earnings or the amount of one s economic activity Such a tax however might not pass the equity test unless it could be shown that all parties would share in the resulting improvement in national output and income i e or toll tax its not who pays the tax but how with the minimal amount of burden of bureacracy and why and for what it is collected it is collected Much of the information you have linked to is based on the hypothitical and is established as such by them The need to consider these economy wide and long term ramifications called general equilib rium analysis is not a new idea in tax theory VI Analysis of Some Specific Types of Taxes The Corporate Income Tax Initial Incidence of the Corporate Income Tax No competent student of taxation believes that corporations pay the corporate income tax Only people pay taxes Things and abstractions do not pay taxes A corporation is in law a legal per son but that is in fact a legal fiction Therefore corporations do not really pay the corporate income tax Conservative Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman is well known for espousing that view but liberal economists share it as well The liberal Nobel economist Wassily Leon tief told The New York Times 20 years ago Corporate income taxes fall ultimately on people Economists have tried but have never succeeded in finding out how the weight of these taxes is ultimately distributed among income groups There can be little doubt that elimination of corporate income taxes would simplify our tax system and limit its abuse 35 end of Heritage report What you have here is a attempt to assume that all burden of taxes are miraculously paid by the wealthiest who of course shoveled ditches for 500 000 man hours within the year to hand the great tax to the government There is no use debating an issue for which one side refuses to see the facts If the Heritage foundation feels that the issue is debatable it can be debated here at the very least in the form of a alternative view User Richard Taylor APP