Yes, you might say that it is an admin nightmare. The state levies a basic 6.5% sales tax, and another 3.6% sales tax for my city. Other towns pay more or less depending on what services they’ve decided to provide.

More than sales tax, a lot of our counties and municipalities are funded by property taxes.

Having all these variations taxed at the state level don’t make sense because people shouldn’t have to pay for services they don’t partake of. People in a town 300 miles away shouldn’t have to pay for my fire protection services. This is the “American democracy” part of the issue I mentioned above…no taxation without representation. Citizens of that city 300 miles away have no representation in my city or county, and they certainly don’t enjoy the benefits of my fire department (they pay for their own). The vast majority of these taxes are voted on by either the citizens themselves through local elections, or (to a much lesser extent) imposed by the representatives who’ve been elected at those same local elections.

When I was in journalism school back in the mid-70s I had a whole semester class in navigating local government and taxation systems, as local government is a big part of many newspaper reporter’s lives.