Hate it. There's nothing wrong with taxes, but this kind of tax is onerous. It adds a shit ton of overhead if you have to maintain tax rates for every municipality in US, or the world. This is where I wish government would figure something else out. Have one state or (preferably) federal agency levy one tax, and then figure out how to disperse the collected income to municipalities - instead of each municipality creating its own tax for specific online goods. It just sucks.
And by the way, big companies will figure it out because they have entire departments to deal with garbage like that. It's the small companies that suffer from this bureaucracy.
It's not hard to "figure something else out"; this problem became a political issue in Australia in the 1980s and was finally solved with a federal goods and services tax in 2000, the proceeds of which are distributed back to the states by an apolitical bureaucracy. There are no more local or state sales taxes. I am sure other countries have found similar solutions. The difficulty is overcoming the political and constitutional barriers to further consolidating federal power in the United States.
Yep. Canada has the federal General Sales Tax (5%), and most provinces have a separate Provincial Sales Tax (varying rates). Some provinces have combined these into the Harmonized Sales Tax, which is collected by the Canada Revenue Agency and the provincial portion distributed according to their respective rates.
Other levels of government are not permitted to charge sales tax, or even income tax. Most cities' primary sources of income are property tax and development fees.
All taxes can be consolidated into one tax, Wealth tax! which can directly account for everything.
i.e. Live in NYC vs suburbs. Got 5 kids vs single.
No income, sales, federal, city, county, state, capital, property, SS... list goes on.
If you're rich you pay more if you're not you don't. How do you know how rich someone is? Total wealth. Federal government should ban any other taxes that state would want to implement
And by the way, big companies will figure it out because they have entire departments to deal with garbage like that. It's the small companies that suffer from this bureaucracy.