Comment by stetrain
5 hours ago
Yes, the quarter is pretty much the smallest useful unit of US currency and even that usefulness is shrinking pretty quickly.
If we would adopt a policy of including local sales tax in advertised prices, skipping to whole dollars would be pretty painless.
The main reason to keep at least quarters is all of the various coin-op machines that are still in service.
The US has too many tax permutations for this to be practicable. Companies would have to make prices a bit higher to accommodate unexpected sales tax increases in some or other jurisdiction.
There's a small industry that specializes in knowing what the sales tax for a particular transaction should be at the moment it goes through.
Knowing the sales tax at a particular in-person store is more feasible, and that’s the only case where you have to deal with cash.
If I’m buying online with a digital transaction you can charge whatever cents are necessary.
You then still have the issue of standardized advertising prices.
Right now, a company can say they sell gadget X for $999, which would not be possible if they had to work out item taxes.
The other possibility is that they now have to mark X up to take into account the most pessimistic possible tax rate and advertise the marked-up rate.
Forcing the simplification of all those taxes doesn't seem like it has a downside, to me.
That would centralize power to the larger taxing authority.
Right now, there's a huge number of elected people in the US who wield real local power through these taxes and other rules that they can make.
It's a headache but we live in the computer age and we can automate administrative things like tax calculation at checkout; we should be using systems to aid decentralization and democratization instead of the opposite.