system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is double taxation bad / often something people want to avoid?

Title says it all. 

Ive seen people say things like the corporate income tax / the capital gains tax / the estate tax etc. etc. is double taxation (which is when the same money is taxed twice) 

why is this often seen as a bad thing / a downside when people discuss tax policy? 

Thank in advance! Thoroughly appreciate it as I am not well informed on economics :)
gpt
People often don't like paying taxes, and paying taxes "double" sounds twice as bad. Basically, it's a boogeyman that lends itself well to Facebook memes.

At the end of the day what matters is often the total tax burden. If you pay 30% of your income via taxes by one tax or five is absolutely secondary. Of course that means you have to pay attention to actually count everything if that's what concerns you, and when implementing new taxes you should make sure to take into account how that affects the total tax burden as well.

But really, things aren't just double taxed, they are triple, quadruple, quintuple, etc. taxed. Think about it, imagine you go and buy a candy bar, you buy that from your income, which was taxed, you pay sales tax, the store you buy it at pays taxes, the manufacturer the store buys the candy from gets taxed, etc. ultimately all money is taxed pretty much infinitely as it cycles through the economy. Does that matter? Not really. From a big perspective, what matters is what share of GDP lands in the pockets of the government so it can finance itself, and from a small perspective what matters to you is what share of your income you can keep to spend.

"Double taxation" for the most part is a boogeyman for interest groups who don't like taxes, nothing more than that.