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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

There exists a school of thought that says making taxes painful is a great way to remind you that taxes have visible consequences on your life just like spending does, which is a point of non-trivial interest ot the American polity. Someone subscribing to that school of thought might rationally oppose non-economic ways to make taxation less painful as a way to prevent a transition to invisible (or even fun!) higher taxes.

I'm stopping here to avoid committing politics on HN.

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It's funny you mention this.

I worked at an e-commerce store that shipped a lot internationally. In the beginning, we had calculations for all of the tariffs and taxes required to ship and added that to the end (ups would allow us to pay for this up-front to make it easier for our customers).

Customers would bitch at us all the time about how our prices were too high. We changed it so they had to pay for all of this separately (and so they knew that we weren't the ones increasing prices) and the bitching stopped.

It's one of the reasons I don't want taxes hidden on goods sold in the US. Because people won't think about it and won't really know when the government starts raising taxes.

They will just assume it's the big, evil, companies overcharging.

It's happening right now with gas. Many states have additional taxes/gallon and people just assume it's the stations.

Really the problem is not having one universal sales tax rate. Here in Australia we have one universal rate, so its included in all prices.

I think this is exacerbated by the various levels of tax in the US, because not everyone knows which taxes apply it makes it difficult to compare prices objectively.

In NZ GST is always 15% and always included but because everyone knows this it makes comparison easy.

In Europe taxes (like VAT and those on petrol) are usually included in quoted prices, and people are quite aware of them.

Not really. In Ireland & the UK, VAT in the region of (22%ish or 17%ish), prices of goods in shops and online are quoted 'VAT inclusive' (likewise petrol), it's only 'trade', i.e. companies that sell products to other business (who then have to charge VAT to the general public) are sold 'ex VAT'.

Oh, that `trade' exemption also applies to Germany. I think that's a common consequence of VAT systems, that only the consumer is quoted inclusive prices.

If you want to maximize the painfulness of paying taxes, why not just have everyone pay their income tax as a lump sum instead of the current system where employers have to withhold an estimate of an employee's tax burden and then the employee has to compute the difference between their actual tax burden and the estimate and get it fixed.

Of course, if you did that, people might try to pay taxes using their credit cards.

It is actually possible, though not necessarily advisable, to pay US taxes using credit cards: http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=101316,00.html

that's how it worked for the first thirty years or so, until Milton Friedman(!) invented withholding. the point was, surprise surprise, to provide a more reliable revenue stream for the government.

Except the popular response to modern day taxation is for people to say that they wish they could pay more taxes instead of getting hassled.

Complicated tax law is the banal result of decades of special interest lobbying to carve out giveaways for favored parties and the finance-industrial complex.

Imposing one form of pain (tax complexity) in the hope of reducing a different form of pain (higher taxation) seems to miss the point. That's like imposing a tax on education to prevent private schools from raising their fees (parents won't be able to afford higher fees plus taxes!!)

I'm in this school. I do my taxes on paper and mail them in. It's probably not rational. It definitely takes longer than using software (but honestly, not a lot longer). I like to be reminded how absurd the whole system is.

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