Calling it a tax is about as enlightening as calling government insurance programs "ponzi schemes".
A tax is a deadweight loss in one sector that (hopefully) funds something else in a (hopefully) net-worthwhile way.
Calling a facilitating cost like marketing or finance or customer support a "tax" is like calling the need to pay to clean the bathrooms at your business a "tax", if you squint and look at it from far away it's kind of similar but it’s also totally uninformative.
In some abstract way, the social obligation for small businesses owners to send their kids to pricey afterschool classes is a "tax" paid by their customers, but that's probably not a useful way of analyzing a complex system
Fair enough. My main point is that the interest expense is being paid collectively, not individually. The same could be said of all sorts of other things.
A tax is a deadweight loss in one sector that (hopefully) funds something else in a (hopefully) net-worthwhile way.
Calling a facilitating cost like marketing or finance or customer support a "tax" is like calling the need to pay to clean the bathrooms at your business a "tax", if you squint and look at it from far away it's kind of similar but it’s also totally uninformative.
In some abstract way, the social obligation for small businesses owners to send their kids to pricey afterschool classes is a "tax" paid by their customers, but that's probably not a useful way of analyzing a complex system