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>I'm sure it has, it's just done in a subtle manner you don't notice. How do you figure? In all grocery stores I’ve visited, loyalty card discounts are clearly

>I'm sure it has, it's just done in a subtle manner you don't notice. How do you figure? In all grocery stores I’ve visited, loyalty card discounts are clearly noted on the item's price tag. I've never seen any hidden discounts (or surcharges) that pop up only at checkout. >Just swipe your "tax setting" card before you swipe anything else. Very true, but decentralizing progressive sales tax collection is rife for fraud. Without centrally tracking everyone's cumulative tax burden, there would be no way to prevent people from using hacked Tax Setting cards that grossly underreport their income or cumulative meat consumption. Hacking notwithstanding, this would also be a lot more expensive that centrally tracking everything, since each Tax Setting card would have to maintain its own memory of cumulative purchases (otherwise, just ring up your massive meat order one steak at a time).

HWR_14 4y ago
> In all grocery stores I’ve visited, loyalty card discounts are clearly noted on the item's price tag. I've never seen any hidden discounts (or surcharges) that pop up only at checkout. Yes. A surcharge won't show up there. The most common way to do things is to have a very high base price and give people variable discounts. > decentralizing progressive sales tax collection is rife for fraud. So is distributing sheets of paper that I can exchange for goods and services. It's pretty cheap and easy to do this and I bet it can be completely done offline with security good enough that the biggest issue will be retailers letting people skip the excise tax. As a sidenote - why are people concerned with the government putting a sin tax on meat?
iggldiggl 4y ago
> otherwise, just ring up your massive meat order one steak at a time David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel "The Pale King" (which is set within the context of an Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre and the people working there) contains something like that – at some point a supposed 1977 progressive sales tax experiment in Illinois is mentioned, which of course went horribly wrong and caused lots of chaos because people began splitting up their purchases in order to stay within the lowest tax band, and so it had to be repealed again after four months.

HWR_14 4y ago

> In all grocery stores I’ve visited, loyalty card discounts are clearly noted on the item's price tag. I've never seen any hidden discounts (or surcharges) that pop up only at checkout. Yes. A surcharge won't show up there. The most common way to do things is to have a very high base price and give people variable discounts. > decentralizing progressive sales tax collection is rife for fraud. So is distributing sheets of paper that I can exchange for goods and services. It's pretty cheap and easy to do this and I bet it can be completely done offline with security good enough that the biggest issue will be retailers letting people skip the excise tax. As a sidenote - why are people concerned with the government putting a sin tax on meat?

iggldiggl 4y ago

> otherwise, just ring up your massive meat order one steak at a time David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel "The Pale King" (which is set within the context of an Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre and the people working there) contains something like that – at some point a supposed 1977 progressive sales tax experiment in Illinois is mentioned, which of course went horribly wrong and caused lots of chaos because people began splitting up their purchases in order to stay within the lowest tax band, and so it had to be repealed again after four months.