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by dangerlibrary 3150 days ago
Imagine a world where there is no corporate tax. Apple does a price analysis and decides the profix maximizing sales point of a phone is $1,000. They price the phone at $1,000.

Then, a 10% corporate income tax rate is put in place.

Does Apple raise the price of the phone to $1,100? Is that now the profit maximizing decision?

According to your claim "Ultimately, only people pay taxes," the answer is yes - Apple would immediately raise the price of the iPhone to offset the loss incurred by the new tax. Except that then, fewer people would buy iPhones. We already know that $1,100 is not the profit maximizing price point for a phone. So, the amount Apple would increase its price is a function of the price sensitivity of iPhone buyers.

This is a little tricky to explain, but khan academy has a video that explains it quite well.

https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...

1 comments

> We already know that $1,100 is not the profit maximizing price point for a phone.

$1,000 is a profit maximizing price point with 0 % taxes. With 10 % taxes it would be different.

Correct. Was that not clear?