I was a corporate manager in a few retail chains with a national presence, a professional services consultant for a software company selling inventory managemen

I was a corporate manager in a few retail chains with a national presence, a professional services consultant for a software company selling inventory management and point of sales systems to mid-sized chains, and I now consult to distributors and manufacturers regarding ERP and accounting system implementation... roughly 25 years in areas dealing with this question. Your take is pretty good. U.S. sales tax is pretty much a consumption tax across the board. If you are business and are buying for manufacture or resale, you don't pay sales tax; those same businesses will pay sales tax if they business is itself a consumer... so a manufacture will pay sales tax on the paper they buy for the office printer, etc. but not until you get to the end consumer (and by consumer I don't necessarily mean individual person... a consumer can be a business). I stopped reading the article at "The Sales Tax Regime": it's just wrong. It's not how taxation works for the most part in the supply chain. Not that this was the only problem to this point in the article. The opening point about the "rest of world" is itself one of the classic informal fallacies: argumentum ad populum. At that point it became clear to me that the author didn't have anything on offer that I would learn from. There is a real problem with sales taxes in the US, but its not found in the article. The problem is the complexity. While there are broad rules of thumb that allow us to generalize that products sold as raw materials or for resale aren't taxed: there are many very nuanced exceptions. Sales taxes and exclusions/inclusions of same are determined at the city, the county, and the state level individually: all with different rates and rules and reporting schemes. And then introduce things like sales tax holidays and the like and get these changing constantly and it's amazing that any of us in the business aren't in prison for tax evasion.... whole companies exist just to keep up with it all. Now of course, that's not just limited to "the sales tax regime". The most difficult tax rule I ran across in retail was in Canada. British Columbia had a rule at the time that certain classes of clothing being sold to children 14 years or younger between certain dates (in the fall as I recall) didn't have to pay the provincial tax (GST applied however)... I might be remembering some details wrong: that was the mid 90's. But getting a general purpose point of sale system to enforce that in a general sort of way was an interesting challenge.