Comment by kasey_junk
3 months ago
America isn’t against baked in taxes because of the appearance of a deal, it’s because there is the large part of the population that is against _taxation_. Their argument (which is probably right) is that if you bake in the tax then it will be ignored by more buyers and it will be easier to raise.
Lots of odd American customs can be explained by this phenomenon. The other major difference in the states is that we don’t have many places that only have federal taxes. States and every locality from the county to the water reclamation board can have tax authority. Those 2 things in conjunction go a long way to explain the differences you see in US tax treatment.
You can do this with State taxes too, but I think your impression that people just ignore it is correct. A good example of this is gas prices. Gas in CA is 70c per gallon, vs about 25c per gallon in the Northeast. This gets baked into the price, and is way more expensive in CA, but people need to buy gas. So you just have to pay. And since it is everywhere in the state, most people don't notice the difference.