[astura]

And unless you are extremely familiar with local tax law you have no idea which purchases are even going to be taxed. If you go to the grocery store and buy the following:

tampons

raw chicken

rotisserie chicken

prepared sandwich

bread and cold cuts

toilet paper

condoms

20 oz soda

12 pack soda

juice

milk

prepackaged donuts

donuts from the bakery

cat food

beer

DO you know which of those items are going to be taxed and at which rate? Me neither!

>Note that the disaster area that is US regulatory overlap means passing a law like this is probably impossible without constitutional amendment.

I actually don't think so. The FTC covers truth-in-advertising laws.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert...

[anonymous5133]

You just use tax software to do it. Then you can just classify each item. Most small businesses only sell a few thousand products and others sell less than a hundred. How does it take to classify all of those? A few hours tops. After that the software does the rest....condoms going to 32932 zip...taxable...raw rice going to 92322 zip...exempt. very easy for a computer to do. The software provider would do all the research.

[RobAtticus]

I think his point was as a consumer it is difficult to know your final bill since some items are exempt, some are taxed at a lower rate, etc.

[astura]

Yes, exactly.

[hakfoo]

This still requires vendors to correctly mark up their products-- to a level of detail that handles all the local rate differences, and shopping carts to be retooled to store said classifications and pass them to whatever tax-calculation service you need. Not to mention paying for the service to query.

It's probably less of a problem for someone starting from zero, but I'd imagine there's a type of vendor that's a huge nightmare. The firm that basically said "we can sell anything we can get from our vendor", and stocked their cart with thousands of SKUs, many of which exist only as lines in CSV files so they may not even know what they are offhand. The cart was probably built in the Eisenhower administration so good luck extending it.

It would be interesting to see some states offer a "trade convenience for savings" model-- rather than try to navigate a maze of regional rates and product categories to decide if a widget is taxed at 8.2% or 8.3, just file a one-page form and charge everyone 8.5% on everything. Saying "pay us $50 per year more in taxes, rather than spend $50k and ongoing service subscriptions to optimize the rates down to the penny" is a pretty compelling argument.

[astura]

1) I was talking about a consumer in a grocery store not having a clue as to what they'll actually pay until they get to the register, not a company shipping products.

2) Zip codes have zero to do with taxing jurisdictions; zip codes merely tell you where the closest post office is.

[Tloewald]

Certainly trying to use Truth in Advertising was always my first thought, but Truth in advertising laws are pretty toothless and I imagine any attempt to do something like this using that mechanism would get tied up in the courts for a long time.

I would love someone to at least make the case -- it seems like a non-partisan thing, surely the free market types should be in favor of price transparency, while liberals should be against misleading consumers.

[testvox]

The free market types I know are generally opposed to requiring tax be included because they think it would hide the "true" cost of the tax from consumers. They seem to like when a consumer is disappointed by the difference between the base and "plus tax" price because they think it will motivate people to try to get sales taxes reduced or eliminated.

[flukus]

> The free market types I know are generally opposed to requiring tax be included because they think it would hide the "true" cost of the tax from consumers.

In this case the "hidden cost" would be clearly printed on the receipt.

[pessimizer]

I agree, but only if they don't include the merchant's profit margin in the price, either.

[Terr_]

Exactly: If someone wants to argue that there's a dollar-amount that represents a "deeper truth" -- as opposed the amount the customer actually has to pass over the counter -- then why stop halfway at taxes?

A rhetorical question, since obviously because it serves the agenda of the merchants, who want to set up a "let's you and him fight" situation between consumers and government.

If we really start peeling the onion, we can talk about the merchants' profit margins, and then also externalized costs in the form of stuff like pollution and bankruptcies (and the tax money spent to clean those up.)