intended to target enterprise companies that were essentially selling software for next to nothing and then charging like mad for the "installation and configuration" to avoid sales tax.
Such is what happens you impose high tax rates: people relabel transactions so they fall outside the tax. The. You have to issue new rules that try to make the relabeling not work. Then, the regulation books start to explode in length to cover the all the blooming techniques, and with it, he regulatory agencies...
Or you could just implement sensible taxes in the first place, e.g. by not exempting ‘services’ from a (then-renamed) ‘sales tax’. It is rather easy to have a loophole-free tax on sales and services, unless you have specific requirements not to charge X, Y and Z because A, B and C – then it quickly can get complicated if people try to squeeze W and V into X and you have to build up regulation books :)
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Such is what happens you impose high tax rates: people relabel transactions so they fall outside the tax. The. You have to issue new rules that try to make the relabeling not work. Then, the regulation books start to explode in length to cover the all the blooming techniques, and with it, he regulatory agencies...
And then the process starts over.
This is America, where even people who pay a next-to-nothing tax rate on high incomes complain about supposedly high tax rates.
Or you could just implement sensible taxes in the first place, e.g. by not exempting ‘services’ from a (then-renamed) ‘sales tax’. It is rather easy to have a loophole-free tax on sales and services, unless you have specific requirements not to charge X, Y and Z because A, B and C – then it quickly can get complicated if people try to squeeze W and V into X and you have to build up regulation books :)
A simpler approach would be to set up a lower tax rate on both sales and services.