Calculating the sales tax on separate items on a restaurant bill Is it legal to tax each item separately? I visited a Pizza place in Detroit, MI on 2/14/2016 Valentines Day. The waitress taxed each item on my bill separately: for example, she taxed me for the pizza, then taxed me for the pop, and added a gratuity.
Forget whether or not it's legal; it's mathematically stupid. The store owner gets no advantage by taxing you on each individual item vs. just taxing the bill as a whole because of the distributive property of multiplication. A(x) + B(x) + C(x) is exactly the same as (A + B + C)x You can try this on a calculator and you'll get the exact same answer each time. The only possible benefit to the pizza place by doing it that way would be the cumulative effect of rounding. But even if they were being that shady, it only amounts to a few pennies per customer. Not exactly a profitable criminal enterprise. More than likely what happened is the waitress didn't quite know how to ring you up so she made corrections to the ticket trying to fix something.
Given that there are almost 200 countries on Earth and most people don't have any information about Lesotho (etc) it is impossible to say what the frequency of such taxes is. There are also many ways in which media-taxes are imposed, so it depends on which sub-class of taxes you're interested in. However, such taxes are by no means rare. Many countries impose a license requirement on televisions and / or radio: Albania, Austria, Bosnia, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Montenegro, South Korea, South Africa, UK and so on. It is also indirectly collected as a fee on electric bills in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Pakistan, Turkey, Mauritius. In general, when broadcasting is state-supported, the state gets its money from taxes, so the case in Norway and Sweden seems to be that you pay a tax for broadcast, and it's just part of your taxes, just like in the US the local transit tax becomes part of your property tax. Note that I did not list a majority of the countries in the world, because I don't know about taxing and broadcasting in Lesotho (etc.). This page gives some information, but it's not authoritative or exhaustive.
Suppose the shop bills you $2000 and you have a $750 deductible. You pay them $750, your insurance company pays $1250. Now suppose instead that the shop purports to waive the deductible. In order to get the insurance company to pay $1250 they still have to bill $2000. Then they don't collect the $750 from you. Presumably they write it off as bad debt. It smells like insurance fraud to me, on two counts: first, the shop expects to receive $1250 for a service but they produce a bill of $2000 for the insurance company's benefit and then do not seek payment from the insured party for any balance purportedly due beyond $1250. Second, the insured party has a contract with the insurer undertaking to pay the first $750 of the claim but has conspired with the shop to avoid paying that amount through deception. Had the shop played by the rules, they would have billed $1250 and the insurer would have paid $500. The shop isn't waiving your deductible; it's getting it out of the insurance company by fraud, with your collusion. Another way of handling this is that the auto body shop submits an estimate for the cost necessary to restore the car to a certain degree but then restores the car to a lesser degree. If everyone is aware that this is happening then it might be acceptable, depending on the terms of the insurance policy.
In the U.S.: To my knowledge all states and jurisdictions that with a "sales tax" technically have a "use" tax, which means the tax liability falls on the purchaser. However, they require "businesses" (whose exact definition varies by jurisdiction) to collect and remit that tax on behalf of "consumers" (which can also vary, e.g., to exclude businesses that resell). Historically consumers have avoided paying use taxes by purchasing from out-of-state businesses that are not subject to their home states' laws on withholding the use tax: while technically a violation of the tax law neither consumers nor states have had an interest in calculating or auditing use taxes owed, except in the case of very large and unusual transactions. There is a large effort underway by states and "brick-and-mortar" stores that lose business to this virtual "mail order tax exemption" to subject out-of-state businesses to the requirement of collecting use taxes on behalf of the state. A few online businesses (notably Amazon) have acquiesced to this demand. To answer your question: In the U.S., an individual who is not making a "business" of selling items or services is generally exempt from the requirement to collect sales tax. It is the purchaser who has the legal obligation to declare and pay tax on such transactions. But purchasers rarely do.
This is not "libel," which is a form of defamation (publishing a false and defamatory statement that injures another). "Bait and switch" is a type of violation of the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Law. That Law makes it illegal for a business to engage in any false or deceptive practices, or to perform any false or deceptive acts, in commerce. Read more about it on the Massachusetts' state government site. If the restaurant's conduct was deceptive and it caused you harm (for instance, you would not have gone into the restaurant and ordered at all if you had known you had to order a drink to get the favorable price on sliders,) there may be a violation.
I don't know of any reason one level of government would be prohibited from taxing itself, though I suspect it would not impose that kind of administrative burden on itself when it could simply re-appropriate funds to the desired locations. But governments can and do tax other layers of government. The Tenth Amendment likely prohibits Congress from taxing states in their capacity as states, though it may tax states on terms equal to private actors. For instance, in New York v. United States, 326 U.S. 572 (1946), the U.S. Supreme Court held that New York was not exempt, as a constitutional matter, from paying a federal soft-drink tax for its sale of mineral waters from Saratoga Springs: By engaging in the railroad business, a State cannot withdraw the railroad from the power of the federal government to regulate commerce. Surely the power of Congress to lay taxes has impliedly no less a reach than the power of Congress to regulate commerce. There are, of course, State activities and State-owned property that partake of uniqueness from the point of view of intergovernmental relations. These inherently constitute a class by themselves. Only a State can own a Statehouse; only a State can get income by taxing. These could not be included for purposes of federal taxation in any abstract category of taxpayers without taxing the State as a State. But, so long as Congress generally taps a source of revenue by whomsoever earned and not uniquely capable of being earned only by a State, the Constitution of the United States does not forbid it merely because its incidence falls also on a State. Whatever the federal government's authority to tax state and local governments, it has chosen to exempt them from taxation on any income &quot;derived from any public utility or the exercise of any essential governmental function.&quot; 26 U.S. Code § 115. As far as I know, most states follow the same basic rule, exempting any of their local governments from taxation on income from government functions. But not everything a goverment does is a &quot;governmental&quot; function. That term is generally distinguished from &quot;proprietary&quot; functions, which generally describes situations where the government is competing with private businesses in traditionally private markets -- like the Saratoga Springs example.
Look at the form letters from the consumer advice center, e.g. Lower Saxony. Keep in mind that the entity may be allowed/required to keep some of your data. Anything that impacts their taxes, for starters. And your information/deletion request might also have to go on file, to mirror their record of a before-due-date deletion.
This question is controlled almost entirely by local municipal and county ordinances. It is not a question of federal law that is uniform across the U.S. and in most cases it is not even a question of state law. So, there is no single answer to your question. Most localities regulate this with some combination of hotel specific building codes (usually incorporated by reference from a uniform building code promulgated by a private non-profit organization as a model building code provision) and hotel specific local zoning ordinances.