[olliej]

That's because other countries aren't as aggressive about pushing governance down to a local level.

For example: in most countries you include sales tax in your advertisement, because why wouldn't you? In the US there is no countrywide sales tax, there are some states with literally no sales tax, and then there are states with high sales tax to compensate for zero income tax (which is excitingly regressive taxation).

Then inside the states each county can have its own array of sales and service taxes, which can also vary according to the goods and services involved, and finally individual cities in those counties can also have their own.

Core to this is that the US constitution explicitly enshrines federalism in the tenth amendment (the last part of the "bill of rights"), that explicitly limits the power of the federal government.

[heimidal]

> Core to this is that the US constitution explicitly enshrines federalism in the tenth amendment (the last part of the "bill of rights"), that explicitly limits the power of the federal government.

I think this is the part that non-Americans fail to understand; we have no central tax authority and that principle is enshrined in our Constitution. Like it or not, so long as the US exists in its current form, so too does our wildly disparate tax code.

[dartharva]

None of this is complicated enough to not have labels print the right price.

[olliej]

The price on labels in a store is an absolutely negligible part of the problem. By the time you're looking at prices in the store you've already chosen that store, presumably on the basis of the advertisements.

So the problem is that your rule impacts the prices everywhere that you see a price: any price you see online, in a poster, in a magazine, in a newspaper, in a mailer, on tv, or hear over the radio cannot include the correct taxes for where you pay for or receive the product/service.

The only place that can have the correct price is an in brick and mortar shop at the final point of sale, and even then some prices can be impacted by things like whether you're a retiree, disabled, veteran, etc. The lack of tax in the price is annoying but is predictable and is consistent. Failing to include the relevant taxes does not impact the relative cost of anything on the shelf. If you choose product A because it's the cheapest, it will still be cheapest once tax is applied. The problem addressed by this bill is when product A is the cheapest on the shelf, but has a secret fee that no other product has, that you don't find out about until checkout.

Legislation that said "you must include the final paid price in any price" in the US literally means "you cannot advertise a price for the product".

To be clear, if you go to an online store, then your rule means none of the listings can include any price information until you provide the final delivery address. Good luck comparing prices.

Hence the law says "your advertised/stated/sticker price must be the full price including any 'fees' and similar that are not set by a government agency".

That is it fixes the only thing that it is possible to fix: prices online including "fees" that are really just part of the price. In addition to being odious and anti-competitive I would also argue that those "fees" are attempted tax evasion to create a fake price for sales, and similar taxes.

Would I like the listed price to be the actual real price being charged? of course, the only people who disagree are also the ones abusing the "fee" BS that this law bans. But any law that attempted to do that by mandating inclusion of taxes in prices would instantly mean that advertisements in the US (I guess technically just CA in this case) would be unable to include any price information.

So is it annoying that when I see prices in advertisements I have to remember to add some % to the price? of course. Is being unable to fix that a reason we should also have to allow retailers to add completely arbitrary and fake "fees" that are a mandatory part of the price that the retailer (or whatever) has complete control over?

I would say the argument is no, we should not allow that, and that's what this law bans.

It sounds like you're saying that because we can't fix the pricing to include taxes everywhere, we shouldn't stop companies from having fake fees?

[dartharva]

> Hence the law says "your advertised/stated/sticker price must be the full price less taxes".

And that is bullshit. In India every manufacturer is mandated to specify MSRPs that are inclusive of all applicable taxes everywhere. The US can have the same thing too, and remove all complexity altogether so that each item will have a uniform benchmark price against which different stores and retailers can show discounts on.

And by the way, India's taxation is much, much more arbitrary and toxic than US taxation, and has a similar kind of structure with various local taxes piling up on federal taxes. Companies still make it work.

[olliej]

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_India, India has a fixed set of GST rates and classes. It does not look like each city can have its own additional GST. The only "local" tax I can find is property taxes, and the US has those too. But we're talking about property tax, we're not talking about interstate taxes (which are illegal under the US constitution), we're talking about what you or I (I'm originally from NZ) would call GST, or the UK would call VAT (the UK adds so much value :D).

The whole point is that there is no set sales tax that is present everywhere.

I will try to make this clear, step by step.

In the US, the federal government does not, and can not, set any kind of federal sales tax, service tax, or similar.

Every state is free to set its own sales and service taxes. The states have set sales taxes from 0% to 7.25%.

In each state, each county can also set their own additional sales taxes.

In each county, each city can also set their own additional sales taxes.

So that total combined tax for any given location in the US can range from 0% (in four states) to 13.5%.

That 13.5% number? That's in Alabama where the state sales tax is only 4% and the average sales tax (state + county + city) is less than 9%. That's just one state.

The 7.25% sales is California, where total sales tax varies from 7.25% to 10.5% (the 10.5% is only in one city).

For a product in the US to include an MSRP that included all taxes it would have to include hundreds, if not thousands, of prices and the cities, counties, or zip codes that those apply to.

This is before you get to those taxes changing regularly.

When we are talking about the insane numbers of tax rates in the US here, we are talking about GST.

When we talk about cities that set their own tax rate, this isn't some population driven thing, its a specific legal entity.

To try and reinforce this, let's consider just the San Francisco Bay Area in California. In this region there are 101 municipalities, each of which can have their own additional sales tax rates, on top of the sales tax rates from nine counties. The population of these municipalities range from 1500 people to a bit over 1 million. For the bulk of these there is literally no space between the cities. Take my house, it's in Oakland, but if I walk past one house on the corner, and then about 10 houses west the houses are no longer in Oakland, they're in Emeryville, which can have it's own sales tax.

Just in my commute to/from work I drive through I think 10 different sales tax rates. This is ignoring any special sales tax rates: some but not all cities have different tax rates for soda, cigarettes, etc.

And understand this cannot be changed, any law that tried to change this would fall to the CA constitution (which limits state government control of local governments), and any thing that tried to remove this control from the states fails due to the US bill of rights (the part of the constitution that also guarantees freedom of religion, guns (sigh), etc). This restriction on the control higher level government has on lower level/state/local governments is fundamental to the construction of US government.

[dartharva]

OK.. seems I was under a major misconception about how US taxation operates, I naively assumed it was similar to other countries' federal+state structures.

Thanks for your detailed reply!

[olliej]

No worries, when it comes to governance in the US just assume the most absurd possible outcome of what seemed like a great idea 250 years ago in a country of 2.5 million people in 13 states, and less than 100 towns we would consider cities today, applied to a country of 220 million people in 50 states and 19000+ cities \o/