What are your thoughts on businesses incorporating and listing the amount of sales tax paid on receipts of transactions at your local grocery/convenience store?

It appears to me that the least surprising place for these things to be listed is where it is most relevant, which is alongside the primary transaction presented as an invoice or receipt. How would you improve on this UX assuming that the fee is definitely going to be incorporated into the cost?

> I generally think most middle-class people aren't taxed enough (yell at me somewhere else about this)

I'll refrain from yelling. Can you expound on this since you thought to mention it?

Sure every government body could make their own website listing telecom fees and then I'd have to go to at least 3 (local, state, federal) to figure out how much I'd be paying or the ISP could tell me since they already aggregate that info.

I do. If they are obligated to collect it, they ought to be obligated to inform the customer at the time of purchase. It's unreasonable to expect customers to agree to vague terms that leave them not knowing how much they are going to pay.

If I go shopping online, I know how much I'm going to pay in shipping and sales tax before I agree to the charge. This doesn't seem that different to me. The ISP knows how much they are going to charge. They just don't want to tell their customers until it's too late. I'll blame 'em for it all day long, it's their fault they don't want to tell me up front, not my government's.

A common anti-poor talking point is that poor people don't make and stick to budgets, but corporate refusal to include tax in prices means that you can't reasonably tell how a given purchase will affect your budget beforehand. A simple trip to the grocery store means that you have to know what taxes apply to every item in your cart before you go to checkout to be able to know how much you're spending. That's not reasonable for the average consumer. If you really think it is, go ahead and try calculating your total of 20+ different grocery store items before you check out--you'll fail.

If an ISP collects these fees and taxes, it's their obligation to inform the customer about them and to include them in price listings, at least in addition to the raw price. For example in Germany b2b price listings will often exclude VAT (which means VAT will still be shown but not included in the listed item price) but for b2c prices will always match exactly what you pay. The only example I've ever seen of a "surprise tax" in my entire life both in private and professionally is artists' social security insurance contributions, which are owed by any business or organisation paying a contractor or employee defined as an "artist or editor" (which includes most creative and media work): the fee is not collected by the person you pay but has to be paid to the social security organization directly and it's something you're simply expected to know if you run a business or organization.

This is false. The ex parte filing itself clearly states that these passed-thru fees are not taxes and that part of the burden ISPs are trying to avoid is having to break out these fees the way they already are required to break out taxes.

The truly bizarre thing is that the ISPs already have the breakdown of these fees available to them when they create the bill. They're actually doing more work to obfuscate this information by summing those amounts together.

The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.

But that's exactly what ISPs are trying to do. If you truly understood what you appear to be arguing for (accountability for elected officials), you should be in favor of requiring ISPs to break out these fees separately...because then customers would be able to see exactly what fees are making their bills so large.

The only reason ISPs don't want to do this is because they impose their own, wholly-made up "service fees" and include this in the fee amount they "pass along" to the customers. If they had to break out fees separately, it would be immediately apparent that government-imposed fees are a substantially smaller portion of the bill than ISPs (and their sycophants) claim.

I understand that your conservative ideology prevents you from understanding that governments can impose charges on businesses that are not taxes. But on that note, welcome to the world of capitalism. Governments are market participants too now. And as previously stated, these franchise fees are charged to ISPs in exchange for them getting the right to utilize public rights of way. It's not a tax because it's a business transaction: money in exchange for access. ISPs are free not to pay these franchise fee, and in exchange for not paying the free jurisdictions are free to deny them access to the public rights of way.

Each dollar in that line item literally offsets a dollar of property tax levy

This is false. In 99.99999% of American municipal budgets, property tax levies are separate from fees levied on businesses. They are independent pools of revenue that don't offset each other. Perhaps you live in the rare business-hostile jurisdiction where business fees offset property tax revenue? (On the tax front, red states are actually phenomenally hostile to businesses; what they don't charge in income taxes they more than make up for through a variety of other taxes and fees on businesses. My employer, for example, pays almost as much to Alabama for "other business taxes" as we do to California or NY, where we have several times the revenue and actual physical nexus, for income and business taxes collectively.)

you'll see a line item for the revenue collected from these fees,

Yes, of course fees are characterized as revenue. It's basic accounting. What else would they be characterized as? Funny Money?

Here's a newsflash: the service fees on your internet bill are also revenue to Comcast, both the pass-thru fees and the additional made-up service fees that Comcast adds to pad the bills. And again, those made-up fees are the reason that Comcast and AT&T are opposing this mandate, because it would reveal that the "service fee" charge on your ISP bill is mostly a made-up service fee imposed by your ISP and not imposed by your local government.

I don't have to care about this distinction

People who proudly proclaim their ignorance are the ones least suited for being involved in local government, especially when those distinctions are fundamental to an issue they're arguing about.

Consider: what incentive do ISPs have to hide municipal taxes? Why would they do that? Wouldn't it behoove them to advertise these taxes to consumers so that consumers know it's not them adding this cost? There's obviously going to be very little cost simply reporting these taxes given they already have to calculate them to pay them.

The obvious answer is that, maybe this happens occasionally, but the majority of these fees aren't what you're describing: this is just a foil that ISPs are using to cover up their own greed.

> It should be the responsibility of public bodies that levy fees to make sure that people are made aware of the nature of those fees. The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.

How does this make sense, given that ISPs are lobbying to be allowed to continue concealing these supposed decisions?

Likewise on every price increase my German electricity provider gives me a listing of each fee and tax that goes into the price. This is routinely used to point out "hey, we're not being greedy, most of this actually goes to your government so maybe deregulating us would save you money, wink-wink, nudge-nudge". If e.g. Comcast thinks its taxation is particularly punishing and anti-competitive, increasing transparency about this would actually help make their argument for them. That they still prefer to be intransparent and pretend this is unreasonably difficult when they literally have to do all the same accounting internally anyway suggests the intransparency is giving them an advantage.