Who Pays Taxes?
Well, that depends, but not on what you think. One of the liberals' most common proposals is to "make corporations pay," in lieu of making individuals pay. One of conservatives' most common comebacks is, "corporations don't pay taxes, individuals do," because companies will just pass the cost along to their customers. The conservatives are closer to being right, but not for the reasons they might think.
The fact is, companies may not be able to pass taxes along to customers. Customers may not be willing to pay them. We've gotten used to the idea that certain costs can just be passed along to clientele. A fertilizer company I covered briefly used to talk about transportation costs as a pass-through, meaning they just tacked on a transportation charge to the farmers. A specialty alloy company I covered used to talk about the cost of copper as a pass-through; they routinely mentioned the fact that they were able to pass 90% of the cost on to customers.
The can (or could) do this because the demand for their product didn't depend much on price. The technical term for this was that the demand was, "inelastic." Conservatives, when they talk about individuals paying taxes, are often treating demand as though it were inelastic. Meaning that companies will just pass the cost along. This may be true for a few products, but not many, and people are very good at finding substitutes. (Liberals like Chuck Schumer are just clueless; they think corporate taxes are cost-free. Others are a little smarter, and they assume the corporate demand for labor is inelastic. They're both very wrong.)
In fact, both individuals and corporations pay taxes. If demand is normal, companies will be able to pass along some, but not all, of the tax. People pay to the extent they're willing to, and companies to the extent they're willing to. Without the tax, consumers could buy more of the product, and companies could sell more of it.
I've fallen victim to the sort of conservative reasoning above myself, when it comes to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid taxes. I had always more or less modeled my thought on my own experience paying the emploeyer's portion - as tghe "self-employment tax." I figured that if a company didn't have to pay its portion of the payroll tax, then I'd see all or most of that in my salary. And I, being in a high-demand industry like programming, probably would have. From my own experience as an independent contractor, my demand for my own labor was fairly inelastic - I wanted as much work as I could get.
In fact, for most workers, the amount of that payroll tax they would see would probably fluctuate, depending on the market conditions for their labor.