I'm the type of person who has always been proud to pay his income taxes.

[ForgedCrank]

20. All of

those things are taxed. Producers don't just assign the cost of post-tax salaries. It's the same with all services all through the chain, for every single component or element. If someone makes raw plastic, the cost is a total including taxes on every step and salary, but it is down to every element, including the TAX they pay for electricity, property, employee salaries, equipment (that is also massively inflated by it's own production chain and the included taxes). It is stacked miles deep, and it is all taxed at every level in the same ways and it compounds into huge totals by the time the price tag is attached for the consumer. No, it's not pure tax, it is a percentage, but it IS in the assigned cost of every single step and every single element, and it is consistent throughout the chain. So yes, they are the same thing. The label "tax" is just stripped away because it is in the cost of producing everything. The taxes are included in all of those things and it is all passed on to the next step in every product and every item in a BOM to produce something. It's layered many companies deep all along the chain.