Not including sales tax kind of makes sense, because it varies so much state to state (and often within the state). This allows companies to advertise one price nationwide.
I think most stores prints their pricing labels locally.
Maybe, there could be a case for national TV to be exempt.
But for prices listed in a store, on a menu card, I don't see any excuse.
Sales tax is complicated. I get why companies would rather outsource that to the register to look up at the end.
The US gives way too much control to local governments.
European companies sometimes have a "No VAT" promotion, which of course doesn't actually mean "No VAT", merely that prices are reduced by what VAT usually is.
I just don’t see how this is better than literally every other country in the world which sets sales tax at the federal level.
And please don’t hit me with ridiculous hypotheticals “if it’s set at the federal level, the government could just increase the tax to 7000 billion trillion percent to steal everyone’s money”.
Do you genuinely believe this, have you done any research, and are you happy to stick with this argument?
Then the County you live in can levy a sales tax. This is to serve the people who live in unincorporated places.
Lastly, Cities levy a sales tax.
So yea, it really isn't that simple in the USA.
Hell, how many countries do you know that have different income taxes based on where they live?
It isn’t that simple in the USA. Yet it literally is that simple in every other country in the world.
I don’t understand why the average American has such main character syndrome that they genuinely believe their country is so unique that they are unable to solve problems every other country in the world has solved. Ridiculous.
States in the US are analogous to countries in the rest of the world.
But they aren’t. States are states, it’s literally in the name. Almost all countries in the world have states or an analogy to states.
Again, only an American would consider each of the United States as seperate countries. Totally disconnected from reality.
Very many countries are more like many US states are with their subordinate counties: that is, a top level sovereign with general powers and negative limits with subordinate non-sovereign entities with limited positive powers granted by the top-level sovereigns.
Australia also has a similar setup to the USA, and has also managed to solve this problem.
I don’t know the inner workings of every country, but I assume there are more in the same position.
I’m sorry, but the USA is not in some crazy unique position that no other country has ever faced before. You just choose believe this inaccuracy.
"State" is the usual legal term for sovereign juridical entities with territory, while "country" is a less formal term that often corresponds to a state.
(And the "countries" that make up the UK aren't sovereign even in theory, though some of them have some degree of home rule granted by the central sovereign.)
> the USA is not in some crazy unique position
Unique? No.
But common? Also no.
And it structurally does make solving some problems quite hard, and it makes changing the structure to resolve those problems also hard.
Only 27 countries in the world are federal states, which is a very far cry from "almost all countries." The entire notion of a federal state is that both the federal government and the state government have independent loci of powers, and there are times when the state governments can tell the federal government to fuck off if the federal government wants it to do something. The exact degree to which this is possible varies from country to country.
For example, you seem to be comparing the US to the UK. But Scotland is not like a US state--it has far fewer powers than a US state, and what powers it does have is entirely dependent on what the UK parliament is willing to grant it. So trying to draw an analogue between a US state and a partially-devolved country within the UK is itself a mistake.
German VAT is also not simple. Before we had a temporary (so another layer of madness) law change, you either paid 19% VAT or 7% VAT, depending on whether you ordered your food to go or sat down at a restaurant. So the same item, for the same person would be taxed at a different rate depending on whether that person walks out with the food or carries it to a table. The restaurants simply advertise a single price and eat the difference [1]. Or to be more precise: the different tax values are priced into the single price, potentially accounting for the rough split between dine-in/takeout orders.
Despite all of this madness, we see a single price at the menu, we can pay exactly that price, and for takeout it actually is not uncommon to actually pay exactly that price. No sales tax, mandatory surcharges or gratuity, just a single, final price.
As for differences in the income needs of the counties/municipalities: this is handled with taxes on the profit of companies based in that area [2]. So the consumer never sees the differences in taxes, accounting is pushed to companies. If McD wants to advertise a fixed price nationwide, their franchisees need to eat the difference.
I get that in the US the states are more like countries in the EU, but we still manage to have the same VAT in all of Germany while apparently US sales tax can vary on the city level.
[1] there are exceptions, e.g. explicit to-go foods are advertised as such [2] there are more ways for this, but this is, IMO, the most similar way to the local sales tax in the US
The resounding misunderstanding is their customers don’t care. I didn’t notice all-inclusive prices until a German friend pointed it out to me. I grew up, in part, in Europe!
Also, no, they may not. Not before you buy. Some counties in America vary their taxes marginally. That means your tax rate on some product today could be different from tomorrow, based on that store’s sales.
I also don’t hate the side effect that it somewhat points out to you that it’s the govt taking a cut
It sure is nice in most of the rest of the developed world to buy a product or service and immediately know how many dollars have to go from me to them because it’s the one price, though.
In every place I have been to, the receipt or invoice has a line item saying how much tax was payable on the transaction. Not least so that business customers can reclaim VAT in countries that have VAT. Different items also often have different tax rates, which is especially noticeable at somewhere like a supermarket where you might buy food, other goods, and alcohol in one transaction.