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flstf, unless big business successfully manipulates it's primary markets to support prices via non-compete and scarcity of product tactics, it is not a given that costs of doing business, such as regulatory compliance costs and taxes paid, can be passed along for customers to pay in the form of higher prices than would otherwise be charged.

Walmart has an influence on the market for consumer goods that chokes off the pricing power of nearly all of it's competitiors. Kroger/Ralph's, Safeway, Target, and Kohl's stores cannot pass along increased costs by raising prices unless Walmart decides to raise prices. Walmart engages in predatory pricing to negatively impact the profits of it's competitors by squeezing it's suppliers and by selling popular items at or below cost, as "loss leaders". Kroger is doing the same thing in this geographical area to gasoline/convenience store outlets by selling gasoline in it's store parking lot stations at or below cost. It brings customers to Kroger to buy fuel and to form a habit of not shopping at the gasoline/convenience outlets....putting some of them out of business and forcing the rest to charge more for gasoline to attempt to make up for profits lost in both gasoline and convenience items sales.

Walmart's suppliers must eat increased regulatory costs and cost of taxes paid, and so must all of Walmart's competitors.

Integerated oil companies' retail outlets cannot raise gasoline prices at the pump if gas pumps in Walmart and Kroger parking lots are selling fuel at or below cost.

Foreign competition is also a huge drag on profits, especially since almost all foreign competitors either pay third world level wages and benefits, or in the instances of Canada and western Europe, US businesses face competition not burdened by the seperate expense of paying for employee health plans.

The greater public pays much more from the impact of corporate lobbying, (literally being permitted to write the legislation affecting their industries) partisan anit-consumer political activities (K Street project), appointments of industry executives to manage federal and state regulatory agencies intended to protect the public interest, than it ever will pay from attempts to pass along tax and regulatory compliance expenses.

The public does not bear the costs of earnings shrinking to zero or less, as in the cases of Ford, GM, and KB Homes. The stockholders should, and do. All any of it about is shuffling the deck that is the pie containing all assets in the US. The share owned by the bottom 90 percent shrank more during the years of "smaller government", "tax cutting" republicans controlling part of congress and all of the executive branch.... 20 out of the last 28 years....than at any other period since the 1929 era.

All during the periods of republican controll since 1981, corporate tax rates and regulatory enforcement and oversight have been cut, yet the bottom 90 percent own a smaller piece of the pie than when the cutting began. It is a much more complex dynamic than direct costs of taxes and regulation being passed to the consumer. Along the way, 5 members of the Walton family, Bull Gates, and Warren Buffett became five of the 15th wealthiest people in the country, concentrating wealth transfered from most of us, to those few.

Taxes on individuals and corporations and regulations and sound oversight are the only public powers demonstrated in the past 95 years, to slow or even reverse wealth inequity.