Quote:
Originally Posted by hleo12
Unless the US as a whole settles with how much they tax, there's little chance of that happening.
I was surprised too, to learn that the US has extra taxes with their sales. I was so used to just paying what's on the tag.
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Quite. I too thought this was ridiculous and that obviously Amazon can do it -- but, well, Amazon can't even reliably *pay* the taxes, since taxes are imposed at all levels right down to individual cities and sometimes even parishes (!) and none of them are in any way uniform. Keeping track of that would be a nightmare, even if the US tax system on a national scale wasn't such a nightmare of complexity.
It has been noted that it's very much in the interest of tax preparation companies to keep this all insanely overcomplicated so you are forced to buy their ridiculously expensive "solutions" to a problem largely sustained by their own lobbying: but city taxes are an entirely different nightmare.
FYI, for Americans: this is all very unusual outside the US. Until I started doing the landlording thing in my late 30s I had never once had to prepare any sort of taxes ever. If all you have is a salary and pension, in the UK it is all done for you by the employer, the pension company, and the local council for local taxes. All I had to do was pay the local taxes, which is one single bill per year, direct-debited out on a monthly basis: the rest was extracted painlessly from my pay, so painlessly that when my employer screwed up in my early 30s and had to engage in a complicated dance to fix up the amount of tax being paid (a dance done by *their* accountants, at their cost, not at mine), I was actually wandering around asking people "they said my tax code was wrong. What the hell is a tax code?" because I'd never had to know what one of those was before.
The US tax system is utterly demented and designed to impose cognitive load on those least able to deal with it, and second only to its disaster of a healthcare system is the single largest reason why I will never ever move to the US.