I live in one of the few states in the US with no sales taxes. It boggles my mind when I go to a store in another state, and buy a $0.99 soda, and the total comes to $1.07. I have also never understood why the price isn't including the tax.
Brazil went through the same thing, but took the (imo smarter) approach of describing the tax breakdown in the receipt
Obviously, the be able to reclaim the tax, they need to know how much has been paid on the transaction.
In other words, I don’t think that argument holds.
0: https://www.theflightexpert.com/all-in-ticket-prices-usdot-r...
Governmental spending can be a huge drag on the economy, and people may not realize just how much, unless they are personally confronted with the true scale of governmental intrusion. Many people today take it all as an unquestionable given, rather than as one choice among many.
We can make either type of tax regressive, progressive, or vary by income level to push people toward the median lifestyle.
Implementation costs and the ease of avoidance should be larger concerns I think.
So in that one case, choosing sales tax isn't regressive.
* Income Tax
* Property Tax
People in all states pay some combo of those 3. Some say no income tax (FL). But that means higher sales tax and property tax. Others have all 3 taxes, but in lower amounts.
Do you really think in New Hampshire you pay less total tax then someone like me, living in the Midwest? You likely do better than NY/Cali, but not the Midwest..
Bragging about no sales tax while paying a higher income / property taxes was a pretty funny / American thing to do..
Seems to me for local taxes land-value tax is clearly the most sensible. It aligns the intensives much better.
On state and federal level you can use flat or progressive income tax.
I don't understand why anybody would do sales or value added tax.
But recently I have been thinking if land-value tax for everything just didn't make sense.
Obviously this is a cherry picked example and can't represent but .1% of the population. But each lever you pull for tax rewards/punishes a different group. A famous example if FL has no income tax, letting retirees stretch their fixed pensions further.
In general, if a state has a lot of tourists coming to it. They won't get property tax nor income tax on the visitors, but they WILL get sales tax. So it makes sense to raise the sales tax, so that you can lower the property / income tax for people that live there yearround.
Tourists will make some locations more valuable then others, so it should have an impact on property tax.
I'd rather not deal with sales tax, gets annoying sometimes with cash.
Not displaying the taxes is infuriating when visiting other places, since unless you look up all of the applicable taxes you're effectively just guessing at the cost of anything.
edit: you can get a refund on the state’s portion of the sales tax, but not the city. (ex. WA state form https://dor.wa.gov/file-pay-taxes/apply-tax-refund/state-sal...).
So in-store vs delivery, or online event vs in-person, etc.
Most entertaining: where I live, we have to charge the client's tax rate if it's consulting work, but our provincial tax rate if it's hosting.
When you negotiate salary with a new employer, do you include the employer paid Social Security and Medicare taxes? Do you say I require $100,000 or $107,650 (Social Security is $6,200, Medicare is $1,450)?