A great deal is said about taxes: How to make them just; how to distribute them more evenly; how to raise them without undue pain; how to lower them sensibly; how to simplify them in one stroke by burning thousands of pages of tax code – even how to make America great again by cheating the poor and the working class. For us retail investors, one thing is more important than anything else: taxes reduce our return. A country that withholds dividend tax, for instance, reduces the dividend for any investor by exactly the amount of tax collected.