Quote:
Originally Posted by Ea
VAT means value added tax, I was fairly certain you had that in USA, too. It's a tax that's added to the sales price, and the collected by the seller.
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It's called "sales tax," and it's different in every city, although large sections of a state will often have the same sales tax percentage. There's a
base state tax rate, and individual counties & cities often have additional taxes.
The entire state of Oregon charges no sales tax. They've had to apply interesting semi-laws to prevent people who live in California or Washington near the border from going to Oregon to buy large-ticket items without sales tax.
There are other states with no sales tax, but Oregon is the most populous, and next to two high-population states. I'm sure all fifteen residents of Montana are ecstatic about their tax rate. (Okay, Montana's population is just under a million people. That's slightly higher than the population of San Francisco.)
Items shipped across state lines don't have sales tax. (I think there's supposed to be a tax applied at some point--the receiver is supposed to keep track of those purchases, and pay taxes on them in his home state instead of the purchase state. But nobody does this.
Nobody. Most people don't know it's supposed to happen at all, and there's no method for paying that tax.)
Sales tax in San Francisco, CA, right now, is 8.75%, and that's considered high. I know it's at 10% in a few areas, but I don't think it's higher than that anywhere.