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| ▲ | dragonwriter 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >These problems can't be legislated away Yes, they can. > because the authority to do so is highly decentralized. So are the problems. And the places where the problems are localized to are the ones with the power to legislate them away. An abrupt elimination of the penny, such as them being immediately banned for use or withdrawn from circulation, would present a problem, sure, but stopping minting them while leaving them in circulation provides a combination of time to find a solution and urgency to implement it; and the problems aren't difficult to solve, there are lots of easy solutions (there's no fundamental difference in the challenges of the quantum of cash being $0.05 that are different from it being $0.01, there's just a few options in how to handle the transition) and all that is necessary is for each jurisdiction to pick one. | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The urgency is quite irrelevant. In many locales you will still have to ask voters for permission and/or have a constitutional referendum in addition to having the local legislature acquiesce. All of those parties can do whatever they want and a large percentage of them don't understand and DGAF. This dynamic plays out over and over for countless issues, this is no different. In the meantime, tax authorities will require compliance as the law demands without any regard for another tax authority requiring something different. I'd be perfectly happy for pennies to disappear but I am not ignorant of the realpolitik that makes implementation nearly impossible. Wishful thinking won't make it so. |
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| ▲ | dpark 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful. Pretend that’s everything in the US is globally unique to us also is not helpful. “No one else has sales tax like us” is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax collecting agencies in 50 states and however many territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal with this and it would have the force of law until/unless legislatures see fit to define different rules. > for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army of people online pretending it’s insurmountable. | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance". It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change. Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it. | | |
| ▲ | dpark 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance". The standard model for regulation is generally that the law empowers some agency to clear up any ambiguities. Doubtful that any state has legislation on how to handle taxation if pennies are unavailable so a state tax body issuing reasonable guidance is a very believable outcome. > It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change. Show me the legislation that says “taxes must be collected to the penny based on the posted price without rounding”. What are these “thousands of independent tax authorities” anyway? Are you under the impression that every city and county needs to agree change the tax law? State law trumps local laws. Washington State doesn’t need Seattle to agree with laws specifying new rounding rules. > Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it. Have you not been around for the last 10 months? But also the courts tend to be fairly reasonable. Faced with conflicting requirements they generally don’t say “fuck it you’re all going to jail” but direct legislatures to fix the issue. No way we end up in a situation where pennies are unavailable and the courts tell stores that they have to shut down or stop accepting cash entirely because there isn’t a legislatively specified way to round transactions to the nickel. Unless I’m missing something, existing pennies are also not being removed from circulation, so none of this seems to be a major issue yet. Legislatures could do their jobs and clear this up quickly of they choose to. |
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| ▲ | pyth0 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny. | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sales taxes in the US are truly and insanely decentralized. The US has thousands of independent sales tax authorities with their own laws and regulations about how sales tax must be computed and displayed. These jurisdictions overlap, the sales tax you pay may be the aggregate of multiple different sales tax authorities between which there is no coordination. Rounding to the nearest 5c or whatever creates a situation where in many locales it would be impossible to comply with sales tax and pricing laws because different tax authorities requiring mutually exclusive ways of making this change. This creates an obvious need to change the law. This is not trivial because they are often written into statute or constrained by constitutional processes. It requires thousands of jurisdictions to all change their laws at the same time in the same way, which is effectively impossible. Even if it weren't the process would require several years. In many locales it requires a democratic vote -- what if the voters vote against it? Courts aren't going to let the government ignore these requirements because it would be inconvenient. It really is a "herding cats" problem. There are many other things in the US that effectively can't be changed because there is no central authority to overcome coordination problems by fiat. Even at the level of all 50 States, resolving these kinds of coordination problems typically takes several decades. | | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > the US has thousands of independent sales tax authorities The US does not have thousands of independent sales tax authorities; administrative subdivisions of states are not independent, or even sovereign in the sense that states (which are also not independent) are, and can be dictated to by the state they are in, if the state decide there is a need, such as an urgent common problem that requires a coordinated solution. > It really is a "herding cats" problem. It's not, though. It's a "convincing cats to find shelter when it rains" problem, that you are trying to make harder by inventing the nonexistent need to also gather them in a herd. They aren't in a herd with the penny as the smallest coin, and they don't need to be in a herd if that changes to a nickel. > Even at the level of all 50 States, resolving these kinds of coordination problems typically takes several decades. There is no need for a coordinated solution between all 50 states, just as there is no coordinated policy on sales tax now between all 50 states. All that is necessary is that there is a solution in every place where the current tax policy would be problematic without the penny. There is no need for the policy to be the same in every jurisdiction with sales tax, just as the status quo policy is not the same in every jurisdiction with a sales tax. | |
| ▲ | dpark 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > effectively impossible Let’s assume you are correct. It is impossible to ever make this change for reasons X, Y, and Z. What happens when stores just can’t get pennies anymore? Does the sky fall? | | |
| ▲ | jandrewrogers 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There are many examples of these types of jurisdictional conflicts in the US due to the strong decentralization of authority. These situations almost always rely on non-enforcement, which works until it doesn't and then you find yourself in court. Enforcement sporadically happens, or more commonly happens, someone with a personal axe to grind demands enforcement happen. I'm all for eliminating the penny and rounding to the nearest 5 cents or whatever. But I am not so callous as to ignore the reality that doing this de facto forces many businesses to break the law because compliance is impossible for reasons completely outside their control. Maybe you're cool with breaking some eggs to make an omelette but I find it pretty gross and immoral to dictate change without satisfying the preconditions that allow it to occur legally for everyone involved. |
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| ▲ | jltsiren 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Coordination problems become easier when there is a pressing need to solve them. If pennies are phased out, companies need to figure out how to do business without pennies. If they can't find a legal way to continue business, they will tell the relevant legislators that the laws should be changed. If the legislators don't see a reason to change the laws, the companies will probably stop doing business in that jurisdiction. If the legislators still don't see a reason to change the laws, then the outcome is probably what the local residents wanted. |
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| ▲ | dpark 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No! The US is totally different from Canada. We cannot learn from anyone else’s success because we are a unique snowflake. |
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| ▲ | mrguyorama 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems. In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage sales that resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to account for. Several states created sales tax tokens worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it didn't technically count as money because states can't mint money legally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to just have explicit rules for the edge case, which is the entire reason we have legislatures. If you don't want retailers to respond to this change in a certain way, have your legislatures say that. >This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. Just stop already. The US is not special. The US regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone else does and it is just wrong. We literally have textbooks full of examples from our own country. We've already phased out coinage before. The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand roads to right hand roads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe switched to Euros in living memory as well! Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard to solve, because that's the only actual reason they are hard to solve >These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized. It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's in your local state government, and it's in your local-er governments, and that is just like a lot of other countries. A couple layers isn't "very decentralized". It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular political party has insisted that the same political party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly. Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt to this quickly and easily and without serious issues, consider electing different people. | | |
| ▲ | quesera 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Meanwhile, 48 state governments 48? Are some states particularly dysfunctional? Or are you excluding commonwealths? | | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I strongly believe that both Texas and California are poorly run and the problem is political but not partisan in nature. I like to leave them out, because both states are the ire of so many people and the brunt of so many arguments And all of those arguments utterly leave out the other 48 states which vary quite a bit in who runs them and who mostly has power and yet do a pretty good job. There are plenty of conservative states in the US that do a good job of running the government and even representing their people and do not take part in stupid shit for partisan political points and even have rather varied ways of doing things. There are plenty of states run by liberals that are doing very well and are perfectly able to solve numerous problems legislatively following standard legislature procedure and have no problem even compromising across the aisle and listening to varied needs. When people use Texas or California in their arguments as shorthand to say "D/R can't run a government", they are lying and are too stupid to look around and pay attention to the 48 examples of mostly functional government by both parties with tons of experimentation and programs to pick and choose from. That is, IMO one of the core issues with why our Federal government struggles so bad. People are failing to look around and notice that 1) Government can function just fine actually 2) We have tons of examples of it 3) Government functioning well doesn't have to be partisan 4) government can easily meet the needs of its people and improve hard problems if you allow them and if you pay attention to it. It's very relevant to the current thread which is full of people who seem to think this is the first time the US has ever made any change, especially one about removing a coin from circulation, or people who think having a layered sales tax regime is "complicated" despite being solved long ago by every single commodity POS company, or that POS software needs updates to change it's behavior. Just a lot of people who don't even know the first thing about what they do not know making fairly loud proclamations about things they didn't even realized have been solved forever are insurmountable problems. Like.... We are humans. We essentially invented math for inventory and tax reasons. We created a system of tamper evident and resistant debt assets out of carved bone and wood sticks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick we split the fucking atom We can fucking remove the penny from circulation. |
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