Comment by mrguyorama
3 months ago
>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges
Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems.
In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage sales that resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to account for. Several states created sales tax tokens worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it didn't technically count as money because states can't mint money legally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token
Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to just have explicit rules for the edge case, which is the entire reason we have legislatures. If you don't want retailers to respond to this change in a certain way, have your legislatures say that.
>This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Just stop already. The US is not special. The US regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone else does and it is just wrong. We literally have textbooks full of examples from our own country. We've already phased out coinage before.
The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand roads to right hand roads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe switched to Euros in living memory as well!
Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard to solve, because that's the only actual reason they are hard to solve
>These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.
It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's in your local state government, and it's in your local-er governments, and that is just like a lot of other countries. A couple layers isn't "very decentralized".
It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular political party has insisted that the same political party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly. Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt to this quickly and easily and without serious issues, consider electing different people.
Somehow, in all of this, you didn't address any relevant point.
Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale, there is no single tax-included price. The US has never retired coinage in the sales tax era, an assumption built into many tax codes. There is no central authority for sales tax or price display nor standardized rules. The rules of multiple authorities apply to single jurisdictions. Changing the sales tax structures that exist are subject to any of statutory changes, voter approval, and constitutional changes, none of which will happen just because it would be convenient for you or anyone else.
Any argument that doesn't address these issues rather than simply dismissing them isn't a serious argument.
> Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale
What does this mean, and why is it relevant to anything? I feel like you’re trying very hard to insist that taxes are impossible to calculate.
> there is no single tax-included price
There’s no single pre-tax price either. All of this taken together makes it trivial to tune the post-tax price to round to the nearest nickel even if your tax authority hypothetically insists rounding is forbidden. The POS system says you owe 31.67 based on the ticket price and the applicable tax, rounds to a target of 31.65, and then applies a 2 cent discount pretax to your purchase to make this work out.
Hell, gas stations have proven prices can be in fractional cents so you could even calculate and apply a fractional discount if you find an edge case where you can’t discount whole cents and still round to the nearest nickel.
> The rules of multiple authorities apply to single jurisdictions.
There is no federal sales tax rule, so there is at most one soveriegn authority whose rules apply to any jurisdiction as to computation and collection of sales tax, any other authority is a dependent one, whose policies can be (and probably are already) constrained by the sovereign's own rules governing sales tax, which can be the level at which solutions are imposed, if necessary. "Thousands of independent authorities" is not a reality.
> Meanwhile, 48 state governments
48? Are some states particularly dysfunctional? Or are you excluding commonwealths?
I strongly believe that both Texas and California are poorly run and the problem is political but not partisan in nature. I like to leave them out, because both states are the ire of so many people and the brunt of so many arguments
And all of those arguments utterly leave out the other 48 states which vary quite a bit in who runs them and who mostly has power and yet do a pretty good job. There are plenty of conservative states in the US that do a good job of running the government and even representing their people and do not take part in stupid shit for partisan political points and even have rather varied ways of doing things. There are plenty of states run by liberals that are doing very well and are perfectly able to solve numerous problems legislatively following standard legislature procedure and have no problem even compromising across the aisle and listening to varied needs.
When people use Texas or California in their arguments as shorthand to say "D/R can't run a government", they are lying and are too stupid to look around and pay attention to the 48 examples of mostly functional government by both parties with tons of experimentation and programs to pick and choose from.
That is, IMO one of the core issues with why our Federal government struggles so bad. People are failing to look around and notice that 1) Government can function just fine actually 2) We have tons of examples of it 3) Government functioning well doesn't have to be partisan 4) government can easily meet the needs of its people and improve hard problems if you allow them and if you pay attention to it.
It's very relevant to the current thread which is full of people who seem to think this is the first time the US has ever made any change, especially one about removing a coin from circulation, or people who think having a layered sales tax regime is "complicated" despite being solved long ago by every single commodity POS company, or that POS software needs updates to change it's behavior.
Just a lot of people who don't even know the first thing about what they do not know making fairly loud proclamations about things they didn't even realized have been solved forever are insurmountable problems.
Like.... We are humans. We essentially invented math for inventory and tax reasons. We created a system of tamper evident and resistant debt assets out of carved bone and wood sticks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick
we split the fucking atom
We can fucking remove the penny from circulation.