> 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.