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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

I want the US government to pass a law requiring all taxes to be included in the listed price at any retail outlet in the United States. It is ridiculous to see an item you're interested in buying, check the price tag, and get only an approximation of how much money you will have to spend to acquire it at the register.

Often with small-dollar items, the exact amount of money is relevant. I might have a $5 bill, but not have $5.39. So if that item that says "$4.99" on the price sticker costs $5.39 when I get to the register, that is just a nuisance and a waste of everyone's time.

And for what purpose? I can't believe that retail outlets don't already just price tax into the stated price.

Are they concerned that people are going want to shop elsewhere and pay the same amount of money but also go through more nuisance and do more math in their head along the way because they prefer to initially see a lower price?

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It is because sales tax is highly irregular, highly local, and changes often without any coordination across the multiple entities that can impose sales taxes. Manufacturers control published pricing for their products in advertising, physically on the container, etc. They are not subject to these local retail taxes, which can change the price >10% between locales.

This discrepancy is intrinsic to the fact that manufacturers set and advertise prices and then local governments effectively modify those prices unilaterally. At some point the customer will have to contend with the reality that the price at the manufacturer and the price at checkout don't match and control of that is spread across many organizations.

That this problem is unsolvable doesn't really leave much hope for solving actual existential problems like climate change.

I'm not from the US, so i'm honestly curious, does sales tax really change that often?

The reason i'm asking this, is because here in The Netherlands there was some news a couple of years ago about changing tax on fruit and vegetables. Our tax authorities basically said: Nope can't do, we need a year to adjust our software for this. This should give you an indication of how often our tax rates change here.

It depends on the locale but usually not more frequently than once per quarter. Aside from this, one aspect that makes it complicated and intractable is that the rules for applying sales tax to various goods sometimes require very late binding -- the correct tax rate cannot be known until checkout because it is dependent on customer decisions at checkout. The common example of this is the definition of "prepared foods", because something you are going to eat immediately gets taxed differently than something you are going to take home. Tax authorities have standards of evidence at checkout based on customer behavior for food items that could reasonably fall into either category.

An argument could be made that sales tax should have rules that don't require this type of very late binding. The issue is that legal authority over this is completely decentralized as a Constitutional matter and there are thousands of overlapping tax authorities. There is no feasible way to compel them to all do something sensible, so the system has to operate under the assumption that some tax authorities will issue these types of rules as a matter of robustness.

>I'm not from the US, so i'm honestly curious, does sales tax really change that often?

It changes more often than you'd expect, but it's not daily. Perhaps yearly, but certainly across space too. Government in the US is very "layered." Our states are basically autonomous countries free to set their own taxes. Additionally, many states give sales taxation authority to municipal governments. There's little coordination across states or municipalities, so you might pay 7% sales tax on restaurants and 1% for groceries, then drive across the river to a different city/county and pay 6% and 2% respectively. There are also sales tax holidays where the tax is suspended for a given period within a state, but only for certain items.

Basically, it's very complicated due to the lack of coordination between levels of government in the US.

Geographically, they change with each city and county, so every 10 km or so.

Temporally, they typically can change annually as voters or the legislature pass new measures.

Online purchase taxes change depending on where the package is delivered, so you can buy multiple items with different costs

Then simply don't put price on product. Most products survive without it. It is not like tablets or smartphones have the prices engraved on them...

Pricing without tax lets you use the same menu across different states.

I’d love to see pricing include tax… and then I think about how difficult that’d be to implement online

Exactly as difficult as applying the taxes after sale...

Except you’d have to provide your address before it could show you any prices at all.

And different cities. https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/rates.aspx

Or, businesses could do like they do in Europe: set the same price after taxes in every state.

Different states? Different counties! The US tax situation is set by state and county and sometimes city, so two Starbucks on opposite sides of the street may have different tax rates.

Now, of course, you can still solve for it by charging a price that in aggregate is enough to include sales tax everywhere, but the way sales tax is calculated currently that actually can make it more difficult (as you have to track the "real" price which you solved for).

I'm in the opposite camp, I want EU to adopt US system, and list fees and taxes separately :) Better yet, I want to have a system, when your gross salary is paid to your bank account, and then you have to wire the money to a tax office by yourself. All that to raise awareness how much money actually goes to a business, and how much is stolen by the government.

If there’s anything worse than paying tax, is having to waste my time paying tax when someone else could have done that for me, and more efficiently too.

That's a part of the problem though: governments made paying taxes so seamless that many people simply are not aware that they are paying them. I mean: they know that something like social security, or VAT exists, but they have not a slightest idea how much money it really costs them. Raising awareness leads to better choices in the next elections.

You want to steal my time and trash my public services. And you promise that it’s all for my benefit. Just no.

I’d call you paternalistic, but you sound more like an abusive father.

Would you mind saying which country you live in? Because if you believe that all, or even majority of your taxes goes to public services then either you're extremely naive, or you've found a perfect place to live, and I want in :)

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