> Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.
Pretend that’s everything in the US is globally unique to us also is not helpful. “No one else has sales tax like us” is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax collecting agencies in 50 states and however many territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal with this and it would have the force of law until/unless legislatures see fit to define different rules.
> for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army of people online pretending it’s insurmountable.
The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance".
It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change.
Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it.
> The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance".
The standard model for regulation is generally that the law empowers some agency to clear up any ambiguities.
Doubtful that any state has legislation on how to handle taxation if pennies are unavailable so a state tax body issuing reasonable guidance is a very believable outcome.
> It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change.
Show me the legislation that says “taxes must be collected to the penny based on the posted price without rounding”.
What are these “thousands of independent tax authorities” anyway? Are you under the impression that every city and county needs to agree change the tax law? State law trumps local laws. Washington State doesn’t need Seattle to agree with laws specifying new rounding rules.
> Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it.
Have you not been around for the last 10 months?
But also the courts tend to be fairly reasonable. Faced with conflicting requirements they generally don’t say “fuck it you’re all going to jail” but direct legislatures to fix the issue. No way we end up in a situation where pennies are unavailable and the courts tell stores that they have to shut down or stop accepting cash entirely because there isn’t a legislatively specified way to round transactions to the nickel.
Unless I’m missing something, existing pennies are also not being removed from circulation, so none of this seems to be a major issue yet. Legislatures could do their jobs and clear this up quickly of they choose to.
> The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance".
Because the law generally allows but does not mandate enforcement against every violation, and because guidance provided by enforcement authorities can be used as a defense in enforcement actions, so long as the guidance provides what is in effect a structured exception to the law, but does not forbid anything not forbidden by the law, yes, they pretty much can in practice, even without explicit authority. And it is actually very common when external facts (including federal law) change faster than state/local process can keep up for enforcement agencies to use discretionary forbearance framed around specific guidance as a band-aid until adaptation of the underlying rules is in place.
Pretend that’s everything in the US is globally unique to us also is not helpful. “No one else has sales tax like us” is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax collecting agencies in 50 states and however many territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal with this and it would have the force of law until/unless legislatures see fit to define different rules.
> for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.
Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army of people online pretending it’s insurmountable.