It's far better than having no idea what your items will actually cost at the checkout.
I remember walking into a McDonalds somewhere in the US deserts, and ordering three mcchickens off the $1 menu. A cheap way to get lots of biomass when travelling on a shoestring. "Certainly sir, that'll be $3.24". But it's 3 items... off the $1 menu... which should be $3. I honestly think that half the hot air around taxes in the US is because the mechanisms for actually handling them are irritating. Lots of loose change, ridiculously complex tax environments for accountants, inability to know beforehand the final price of something...
Back here in Australia, if something costs $5, that's it. It doesn't matter to you whose cut goes where. You want the object, it's $5. Not $5.40, discoverable later in the chain. The tax in this system is less opaque, because it's right there, included in the price. It's not something that suprises you at the end as an irritating thing making the process more complex.
In any case, when you buy something, no-one complains that the retailer made 20%, the distributors made 30%, and the wholesaler made 40%. People only whine about they government's 10%. Most people are utterly clueless about which business parties get what sort of cut (witness the endless complaints about online app stores 'stealing' 30%...), so why should specifying how much the government makes be special? If your receipt instead told you how much the wholesaler made, or your system added on the wholesaler cut after the sticker price, everyone would be complaining about those greedy wholesalers.
And, as others have said, sales tax certainly has accountability. Australia's GST has been 10% since it was introduced in the mid-90s (replacing a confusing hodge-podge of existing sales taxes). It hasn't changed, and the political parties fear changing it because it is a huge political negative to do so.
I remember walking into a McDonalds somewhere in the US deserts, and ordering three mcchickens off the $1 menu. A cheap way to get lots of biomass when travelling on a shoestring. "Certainly sir, that'll be $3.24". But it's 3 items... off the $1 menu... which should be $3. I honestly think that half the hot air around taxes in the US is because the mechanisms for actually handling them are irritating. Lots of loose change, ridiculously complex tax environments for accountants, inability to know beforehand the final price of something...
Back here in Australia, if something costs $5, that's it. It doesn't matter to you whose cut goes where. You want the object, it's $5. Not $5.40, discoverable later in the chain. The tax in this system is less opaque, because it's right there, included in the price. It's not something that suprises you at the end as an irritating thing making the process more complex.
In any case, when you buy something, no-one complains that the retailer made 20%, the distributors made 30%, and the wholesaler made 40%. People only whine about they government's 10%. Most people are utterly clueless about which business parties get what sort of cut (witness the endless complaints about online app stores 'stealing' 30%...), so why should specifying how much the government makes be special? If your receipt instead told you how much the wholesaler made, or your system added on the wholesaler cut after the sticker price, everyone would be complaining about those greedy wholesalers.
And, as others have said, sales tax certainly has accountability. Australia's GST has been 10% since it was introduced in the mid-90s (replacing a confusing hodge-podge of existing sales taxes). It hasn't changed, and the political parties fear changing it because it is a huge political negative to do so.