A letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal made the following claim: “The tax code’s most regressive and unfair individual tax is—guess what?—the corporate income tax! All products and services purchased by individual taxpayers and the poor must be priced to pay for the federal income taxes of all the companies involved in the production/distribution/retail chain. So not only does the corporate income tax impose an unseen, incremental 40% tax burden on the vast majority of individual taxpayers, it also reduces the buying power of those too poor to pay income taxes” [Christy, 2006, p. A17].

Discuss the assumptions about the nature of the corporation tax implied by this statement, using the tax equivalence relationships provided in Table 14.2.