Sales taxes as they are known in the US were largely introduced in the 20th century. The half-penny was phased out in the mid-19th century.

The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges that simply don't exist as problems that needed to be solved in other countries. These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized. Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.

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.

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dragonwriter 3 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 An abrupt elimination of the penny, such as them being immediately banned for use or withdrawn from circulation, would present a problem, sure, but stopping minting them while leaving them in circulation provides a combination of time to find a solution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 2 hours 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 11 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 11 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.

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pyth0 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny.

	▲	jandrewrogers 10 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.
	▲	dpark 11 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 9 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.

	▲	jandrewrogers an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Somehow, in all of this, you didn't address any relevant point. Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale, there is no single tax-included price. The US has never retired coinage in the sales tax era, an assumption built into many tax codes. There is no central authority for sales tax or price display nor standardized rules. The rules of multiple authorities apply to single jurisdictions. Changing the sales tax structures that exist are subject to any of statutory changes, voter approval, and constitutional changes, none of which will happen just because it would be convenient for you or anyone else. Any argument that doesn't address these issues rather than simply dismissing them isn't a serious argument.
	▲	quesera 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Meanwhile, 48 state governments 48? Are some states particularly dysfunctional? Or are you excluding commonwealths?