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Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

From the article linked in the first paragraph: "The legislation — the first bill of its type across the state — would prohibit advertising a price for a good or service that does not include all required charges other than taxes and fees imposed by a government.

Why are taxes and govt fees exempt? This reeks of "rules for thee but not for me." Either to goal is to avoid misleading customers with low advertised prices, or it's not. For example, California has a ~50 cents/gallon fuel tax. Can gas stations start advertising prices that are 50 cents lower than they actually charge and be compliant with this law?

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A classic example in the US is sales tax. Those are taxes determined by the final sale price which can vary depending on state, county, or city. More importantly because those fees aren't controlled by the company doing the bait and switch it's the same for every company.

This bill is very clear that the target is "prices" that reject parts of the price that are entirely set by the person selling the goods or services. e.g. Ticketmaster, etc's entirely bogus "service" charges, or airbnb's that say $x/night but have a $500 cleaning "fee".

I hear you, but the press release explicitly said that the goal of the bill is to prevent companies from attracting customers with a misleadingly low price and then charging a higher price. How are government fees and taxes -- especially industry-specific government fees that consumers may not be aware of -- not the exact thing that this bill stands against?

If anything, this just encourages lobbying and corruption. If you have a restaurant, you can't just covertly charge a 5% worker benefit fee. But you could if you're part of a restaurant lobby that turns that 5% worker benefit fee into a 5% restaurant tax that benefits restaurant workers!

Independent of the bill's goal, I also think that seeing all govt fees and taxes upfront might be a useful exercise in California and elsewhere. When fees are hidden, people forget about them and don't evaluate them. But if they are front and center, then that would hopefully make politicians more accountable. For example, the California train project has spent something like $10b so far and there's nothing to really show for it. And that money came from somewhere, but it's easy to forget about that if you're not reminded constantly. But if every driver in California paid $1 extra on every gas bill for the last 20 years for a "train tax" that was on the receipt, then maybe people would hold their government more accountable. (This is an apolitical comment: caring more can mean cancelling the train project, or funding it 3x more. Whatever constituents think is best.)

Because government taxes and fees are a constant rate (given a particular good and location, anyway).

If I'm price-comparing hotels, and I see one that's $100/night, and another that's $75/night, I know that the cost may be higher due to taxes, but it will be higher by the exact same percentage for both of the hotels.

But if I go and book a room at the $75/night hotel, show up, and find that they're hitting me with a surprise $50/day "resort fee", then I'm going to feel cheated, and wish that'd I'd booked at the $100/night hotel (assuming that one doesn't have a resort fee, anyway).

The deceptive hotel tried (and succeeded!) in attracting me with a misleadingly low price, when I would have been able to get a better price from a different, non-deceptive hotel. Taxes really have nothing to do with that; people aware of how things are usually done in the US will know that no business would list taxes included unless they were required to, as doing so (when others do not) is essentially a competitive disadvantage.

I do agree with you that a better new law would require businesses to include taxes in their prices. But that's frankly so far outside the norm in the US that I wouldn't be surprised if the bill's author(s) expected it would fail to pass with that kind of language in it, so they limited it to something they actually thought would pass. Baby steps! Incremental improvements are better than nothing.

Also consider that there are many weird people in the US who like having sales taxes added later and itemized out, due to some misguided belief that including taxes up front would let the government raise taxes without anyone knowing. This is related to the unfortunate phenomenon of the IRS not being allowed to essentially do our income taxes for us.

> If I'm price-comparing hotels, and I see one that's $100/night, and another that's $75/night, I know that the cost may be higher due to taxes, but it will be higher by the exact same percentage for both of the hotels.

1) IMHO this doesn't help. If I don't know what the taxes are, then knowing that they will be similarly high on either transaction doesn't help me with budgeting. Just like it's hard to know if a $75/night hotel is within my budget without knowing the size of its resort fee, it's also hard to know if it's within my budget without knowing if the tax on it is 8% or 18%.

2) FWIW this varies by county, so it's easy to have two hotels that are a mile apart but with different tax rates. To pick a random state, here is an old table of hotel taxes in Florida by county: https://www.floridasalestax.com/florida-tax-law-blog/2015/ja.... These taxes vary from 7% to 13%, so if you're picking hotels next to a county border, the difference can be noticeable.

If you're comparing prices currently you see two prices advertised:

Company A: $100

Company B: $140

Company C: $150

Company D: $155

Currently, when you go to buy from any of these companies they all add the hypothetical 10% taxes you would be required to pay, but company A also adds $60 in "service fees", Company B adds $20, Company C adds $10, and company D becomes the cheapest.

If you remove the bullshit fees the advertised prices are falsely excluding then the advertised prices give you the actual real relative position.

Hence there is value in this law, even if it doesn't force the taxes to be included.

Now your example of hotels is a worthwhile extension to this, where you could say "if the location of the purchase or service is fixed, the listed price must include all applicable taxes", but there's a clear benefit to banning the BS "fees".

This is ignoring the whole tax avoidance/evasion I believe these "fees" are also being used for.

Taxes and government fees are exempt because it promotes transparency!

I wish gas stations showed taxes separately, but I'm guessing retail gas stations aren't the ones collecting and remitting those taxes. It's probably taken earlier in the supply chain.

It doesn't promote transparency. It means you still don't know how much something is going to cost by looking at the listed price of that thing. That's the opposite of transparency.

Including taxes and fees in the advertised price won't prevent stores (or anyone else) from making it clear what percentage of that price comes from taxes and government fees. I'd love to see more stores provide an itemized breakdown of those fees so that we can see how much of the price to blame on greedy vendors vs sneaky governments.

What I want most of all though is to only ever pay what the listed price of an item is. I want to be able to walk in with a single $5 bill and pay for something that says it costs $5 and have that be the end of it. It should really just be that simple. Other countries do it. We can too.

It would require a massive overhaul of the tax code in every state, not to mention that it would require state-by-state coordination because Congress cannot force them to comply. Other countries do it because their constitution generally does not include a clause like the Tenth Amendment.

But wow, the things it would do to national marketing. Imagine an iPhone launch. Tim Cook gets to the pricing slide and it says, "Starting at $1099 in Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon. Check your local store for your pricing in your location." That's our cue to mentally add our local tax rate like we do already, now with the added benefit of feeling bad about where we live.

That might be a good thing! If the announcement said that it cost extra in some state, maybe residents of that state would apply more pressure to do something about it.

It doesn’t “cost extra”, it has a different tax structure. Sure, there might be no sales tax in OR, but there sure is income tax. Just north in WA, it’s the opposite where there is sales tax but no income tax.

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