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FCC says “too bad” to ISPs complaining that listing every fee is too hard (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Aww ... poor little ISPs.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

after a quick look into it, the main problem is tax in a lot of places is based on the Total amount sold, not on each item.

I'm actually confused, aren't taxes a percentage? The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no? Or is my brain not do math good? Can someone smarter than me explain?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no?

Suppose you buy two items costing x and y, and there's a constant sales tax of t (say 10%, or 0.1). You'd pay t * x + t * y, or t * (x + y). You can even generalize this to Σ(t * x) = t * Σx (for x ∈ X, where X is the set of prices you're paying).

In other words, yes.

In case you want the math name for this property, it's the distributive property.

~~I think the issue they were bringing up though is that tax is not applied equally to all items, and that tax may be determined by number of items sold. I don't actually know if this is true or not, but if it is, the distributive property doesn't apply anymore.~~ Edit: I re-read the comment, that doesn't look like what they were saying actually. Either way, if tax is weird like this, distributive property may not apply anymore.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hopefully someone can. Me no math good either.
[email protected] shared this:

https://www.taxjar.com/blog/retail/can-retailer-include-sales-tax-in-the-price

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Say you list a table lamp on your website at $100, tax included. Well, if you sell that table lamp to a buyer in Connecticut (where the tax rate is a flat 6.35%) then you’re required to remit $6.35 in sales tax to the state of Connecticut on that transaction.

But if you sell the same table lamp to a buyer in Aberdeen, Washington, where the sales tax rate is 9.08%, then you’d be required to remit $9.08 in sales tax to the state of Washington.

As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including tax in your pricing.

Further, US customers are accustomed to paying their local sales tax rates. We’re so accustomed to paying odd amounts in sales tax that paying a flat rate might surprise us or leave us a little confused.

This is anti-consumer bullshit nonsense. All they did was hid their only real "con" behind a wall of text. "As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including sales tax"

And the last paragraph is fucking stupid too. People are too used to seeing numbers, so other numbers will confuse them!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Last paragraph feels like marketing language for “it’s free real estate”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

100% agree