“Small businesses will use simple programs that will apply the taxes—it’s already baked into most prevalent platforms. Yes, it’s a pain, but anyone who expects any government to miss any opportunity for increasing tax revenue is living in a fantasy.”
There are thousands of different sales tax rates in America. No business without a fulltime bookkeeper is going to be able to deal with it.
It’s all automated for state taxes, and unless you are Obama, that number is still 50, plus DC. I don’t think it includes municipalities at this point. Either way, it’s all just another entry in a simple database and the service costs will be passed to the consumer. It will be one chunk of code thrown into every storefront.
Whether there’s one rate or one million really has no effect on the system. It’s foolishness as usual—compliance costs will ultimately negate any increases. As Einstein said, “the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius is finite.”
The sales tax calculation is simple. You pay a little bit of money for an online service that calculates the tax based on the destination zip code. Filing is probably a similar, but more expensive service (I haven’t looked for those). But keeping up to date with 1000’s of tax jurisdictions is a non-issue.