“How much is it?” would seem a simple question.
I live in a conservative area right now and can't remember a local sales tax ever being voted down. The only case I can think of was when I lived in the middle of a large city (very left leaning) and the local sales tax was voted down because the politicians pushing for it had not said exactly what it would be spent on other than "special projects". They had previously diverted a good chunk of property tax revenues to building a new sport stadium because the billionaire owner was threatening to move the team to another state. The public wasn't given an opportunity to vote on that gift of their taxes to a billionaire so there probably was both mistrust and a degree of blowback. Other than that case, local sales taxes, dedicated to a local purpose or project list, are popular here.
If the sales taxes all went to DC to be piled together and subject to the whims of whatever party was in charge at the time, they'd be far less popular. Asking locals to pay an extra 1% to renovate and expand the local schools is pretty easy. Asking the entire country to pay an extra 1% to "Make American Schools Great Again" is a much more difficult sell.
It's really hard to figure out how many more dollars I'm going to pay in taxes if the sales tax goes up 1%. I have to figure out how much money I spend on goods that have sales tax. Okay, so I put $X in my savings account which isn't taxed, and I pay $Y in rent, which means I'm spending $Z on other stuff. Oh right, but not all of that has sales tax, so I have to take that stuff out. It gets complicated, fast, and the best you're going to get is an estimate. If any of those numbers change, my sales tax burden changes.
Plus sales tax is deferred until you spend the money, so there's no immediate obvious impact. It's not like you have less money than you did last year, although your spending power does go down every so slightly.
Income taxes are unpopular to adjust because it's easy to see how much you're losing, and it directly impacts your paychecks, which people don't like.
Of course, depending on where you are, your 2.16 coke could also jump up to 2.21 or 2.26 because of the bottle deposit. And then another 2.34-2.42 if there's a sugar tax. It could even go up to 2.46 - 2.54 depending on if you buy that coke in a store vs a restaurant.
There's some hyperbole there, but the cities and states get to tack on their own taxes for whatever reason and the public largely doesn't care.
Then there was New York Soda size cap that was almost immediate overturned in court challenges before it could even take affect.
Taxes make a pack of cigarettes $12 in NY but this was done slowly over time. And the loud protests have turned into teeny grumbles.
Though it also helped that Mike Bloomberg is not a man Big Tobacco can buy, given the fact that he is one of the richest men in town already, in a very wealthy town.
This opinion is most clearly expressed by Joel Barlow in "Letters Addressed to the Yeomanry of the United States: Showing the Necessity of Confining the Public Revenue to a Fixed Proportion of the Net Produce of the Land; and the Bad Policy and Injustice of Every Species of Indirect Taxation and Commercial Regulation" (1791).
I wonder if this was originally intentional, to prevent taxes from invisibly rising without the people being aware of the impact of the price.
It also makes it much harder for national brands if they like to have nice round numbers as the cost of things (which they seem to) - they can’t charge $1.00 for a soda everywhere, or their margins would be crazy wonky depending on region
That an interesting history, thanks.
The policy sort of misses the point when you are at the till and the item doesn’t cost what you thought it did. There is no way of telling if you have been hit by a broad-based sales tax, a targeted one or both.