[gnicholas]

> For such an in depth example you really missed this.

Like many HNers, I'm on here in my spare time, while not running my startup or caring for my kids. Please forgive my not including every argument and counter-argument here.

But to reply, if you bought stock on the stock market, then yeah that is double taxed because the corporation also pays tax on their corporate income. We could get into that whole can of worms, but it's frankly too complex and off-topic. The point of my post was to show some common arguments and counter-arguments.

[xyzzyz]

Yes, and if you buy a can of Coke at the store with the proceeds of the sale, you're then triple taxed when you pay sales tax, and then the business owner is quadruple-taxed when he books some part of it as a profit, just like his supplier is quintuple-taxed when he is paid by store owner for the Coke supply, and so on, and so on.

Clearly, this is absurd: it is universally recognized that transactions often create tax events. There's no "double taxation" rule that doesn't allow "the same money" to be taxed twice, it's just we don't tax the same transaction twice.