This obscures the tax burden from the end user, transparently blending it with the price of the goods and the merchant's profit.
Consumers should be consciously aware of the split.
Consumers should be consciously aware of the split.
https://www.transportation.gov/policy/aviation-policy/airlin...
Nobody is having the information hidden from them in any case. Even pre-filled from the IRS, it would be right in front of you.
2) Surveys about understanding of how taxes work, of personal or typical tax burden, and even about whether a given individual believes they were affected by some new high-profile tax law or other (versus whether they actually were...) demonstrate pretty damn conclusively that this approach has entirely failed, anyway.
If the taxes are silly and ridiculous (which many are), then they should be rolled back and people should know about them. That's not conservative, it's just common sense.
Here in Germany every bill, every receipt will contain that information. (I mean, obviously, it’s legally required.)
Different sellers do this differently in terms of clarity, though I think this has little to do with any kind of price signal to the buyer or sticking it to the government or something like that.
My feeling is that the more likely it is that the customer is a company (which do not have to pay VAT) the more clearly do sellers communicate the VAT part of the price.
In fact, if you are not selling to consumers you can ditch that VAT altogether when you communicate your prices. Alternatively (when talking about online retailers) they may provide a toggle to switch between being a business customers or a private customer, e.g. here the toggle top left next to the Conrad logo: https://www.conrad.de
Tax is included in all end user prices in every European country I’m aware of.
They are not congruent.
Taxes in Europe are also much higher in general. Perhaps this is a result of obscuring the amounts in the advertised prices—it never raises to the level of conscious consideration of the tax burden at point of purchase.
Sure you can argue some of that goes to military (a safe nation is kinda infrastructure) and healthcare/Welfare (healthy and fed employees and customers are good for business too) but regardless your view on taxes, they all somehow end up back to helping the nation regardless of how efficiently or directly that happens.
The idea that the primary purpose of taxes is to provide infrastructure hasn't been true ever.
The bulk of expenditures are social welfare programs and other similar handout and wealth transfer programs intended to punish the successful and reward the failures for political purposes.
Social security, healthcare, education often comprise over 50% of expenditures in most first world countries. Interest and debt are also another major expenditure.
The "core responsibilities of the state" , that is the military, justice system and internal security, infrastructure usually consume less than 20% of government expenditures.
In America this is absolutely false in every sense.
It’s not the majority of the budget. They aren’t punishing success and they don’t “reward failure”. If you don’t want to succeed because a subset of your income will go helping those with bad luck then you’re welcome to be a failure.
> The "core responsibilities of the state" , that is the military, justice system and internal security, infrastructure usually consume less than 20% of government expenditures.
Hmm who said that was the core responsibility? I think you’re missing a bit in the list…
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If the 6820 billion spent by the US government in 2021, 4394 billion were spent on income security, social security, health and medicare. That's almost 65% of government expenditures going directly to wealth transfer programs.
Mind you that doesn't account for all such programs (notably that value excludes education, housing, agricultural subsidies,etc...) So the real rate is actually higher.
The us is not unique in these ratios in the western world.
[0] https://preview.redd.it/us-government-revenue-spending-and-d...
Cursory look at insurance company executive pay does not show any anomalies.
[EDIT] That is, I'm skeptical that if one removed that limit, competition would keep margins where they are. Forcing all profit to come out of 15% of revenue probably does play a major role in keeping the actual margin as low as it is.
I suppose one could assert they are all in cahoots and have a secret deal to accept low single digit profit margins to keep out of the news cycle, while simultaneously agreeing to pay healthcare providers more and more each year, but I would want proof.