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by lpolovets
984 days ago
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I hear you, but the press release explicitly said that the goal of the bill is to prevent companies from attracting customers with a misleadingly low price and then charging a higher price. How are government fees and taxes -- especially industry-specific government fees that consumers may not be aware of -- not the exact thing that this bill stands against? If anything, this just encourages lobbying and corruption. If you have a restaurant, you can't just covertly charge a 5% worker benefit fee. But you could if you're part of a restaurant lobby that turns that 5% worker benefit fee into a 5% restaurant tax that benefits restaurant workers! Independent of the bill's goal, I also think that seeing all govt fees and taxes upfront might be a useful exercise in California and elsewhere. When fees are hidden, people forget about them and don't evaluate them. But if they are front and center, then that would hopefully make politicians more accountable. For example, the California train project has spent something like $10b so far and there's nothing to really show for it. And that money came from somewhere, but it's easy to forget about that if you're not reminded constantly. But if every driver in California paid $1 extra on every gas bill for the last 20 years for a "train tax" that was on the receipt, then maybe people would hold their government more accountable. (This is an apolitical comment: caring more can mean cancelling the train project, or funding it 3x more. Whatever constituents think is best.) |
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If I'm price-comparing hotels, and I see one that's $100/night, and another that's $75/night, I know that the cost may be higher due to taxes, but it will be higher by the exact same percentage for both of the hotels.
But if I go and book a room at the $75/night hotel, show up, and find that they're hitting me with a surprise $50/day "resort fee", then I'm going to feel cheated, and wish that'd I'd booked at the $100/night hotel (assuming that one doesn't have a resort fee, anyway).
The deceptive hotel tried (and succeeded!) in attracting me with a misleadingly low price, when I would have been able to get a better price from a different, non-deceptive hotel. Taxes really have nothing to do with that; people aware of how things are usually done in the US will know that no business would list taxes included unless they were required to, as doing so (when others do not) is essentially a competitive disadvantage.
I do agree with you that a better new law would require businesses to include taxes in their prices. But that's frankly so far outside the norm in the US that I wouldn't be surprised if the bill's author(s) expected it would fail to pass with that kind of language in it, so they limited it to something they actually thought would pass. Baby steps! Incremental improvements are better than nothing.
Also consider that there are many weird people in the US who like having sales taxes added later and itemized out, due to some misguided belief that including taxes up front would let the government raise taxes without anyone knowing. This is related to the unfortunate phenomenon of the IRS not being allowed to essentially do our income taxes for us.